In the last hour I checked the size of the front page of six news web sites using http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com. Here are the results:

• Fairfax's Stuff – 1.7MB
• The New Zealand Herald – 450Kb
• The Sydney Morning Herald – 940Kb
• The Australian – 874Kb
• Radio New Zealand News – 88Kb
• ABC News Radio – 294Kb

So you can read the Radio New Zealand News page 200 times and still download less data than a single read of Stuff.

While these numbers may not be important if you've got broadband and an unlimited download plan, they make a huge difference when you are on the end of a slow link or paying through the nose for each megabyte of data.

None of the sites attempted to show one of those awful TV style advertisements during this test. I hate to think what they might add to the totals.

Update: The National Business Review weighs in at 398Kb.

Today The Australian’s Media section ran Readers not averse to paying for online content by Nick Tabakoff. As the headline suggests the story looks at an international study by PricewaterhouseCoopers which found ‘readers could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas’.

Could this be related to the PricewaterhouseCoopers study referred to by Miriam Steffens in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Readers reluctant to pay for online news?

It is.

Now, strictly speaking there’s a thin semantic line between ‘readers being reluctant to pay’ and ‘readers not averse to paying for’. One does not directly contradict the other. But the two headlines are clearly two different interpretations of the same data.

Or as we say in the media, they each have a different spin.

Which is more plausible?

Both Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the owner of The Australian and Fairfax Media, owner of the SMH have a vested interest in the story.

Murdoch has gone on the record in recent days saying he wants to charge readers for online content on News Corporation web sites. The headline on Nick Tabakoff’s story squares nicely with Murdoch’s recent statements on the issue. We all know Murdoch interferes editorially in his papers. While it’s extremely unlikely he had a hand in this particularly story, it reflects the official line now coming from News Corporation.

Fairfax is more complicated. The company’s The Australian Financial Review operates behind a content pay wall. It costs around $3 a pop to view an AFR story, though most paying customers have all-you-can-eat subscriptions. On the other hand the SMH, The Age and the company’s other online properties including New Zealand’s stuff.co.nz are all free to readers and make money from online advertising.

In The winter of journalism's content (no longer on-line), The Australian reports online publishing, widely expected to supplant newspapers and magazines, will only go so far in replacing them and leave a gaping hole.

This worries me.

The economics of online publishing mean there isn't enough money to pay for in-depth news investigations and searching features on politics, crime and other social issues important to modern democracies.

Advertisers are bailing out of print publications. They are drawn to the web because they see it as a more cost-effective and accountable medium (that's disputable).

In particular, online advertisers like to place their messages next to niche interest stories to more closely target interested readers. For example car makers prefer to buy banner ads on pages featuring stories about driving.

Even if a publisher could find the money to produce hard news stories, advertisers wouldn't want them.

The obvious answer is to publish fewer hard news stories and more of the marketable lightweight fluff. However, traditionally those difficult, hard news stories sold printed newspapers and dragged in readers in the first place.

But this vicious economic cycle is nothing compared to what can happen in a society that no longer has a practical mechanism for scrutinising governments and out-of-control corporations.