I visit Korean websites daily and I have noticed how their pages load very slowly even after accounting for the limited bandwidth across Pacific Ocean.  Korean webpages use a lot of graphics and animations than webpages from other countries.  So I did some digging because the situation in Korea might show us a glimpse of the future in America when broadband becomes ubiquitous.  This is what I found.

Three columns on the left are American news websites: Yahoo News, New York Times, and Washington Post.  Three columns on the right are Korean news websites: Sports Seoul (mislabel as seoulkorea, sorry), Sports Today (stoo), and OhmyNews.

First thing I noticed was the size differences.  American webpages are 100K to 250K.  Korean webpages range from 650K to 1.8 meg.  Wow.  Language encoding differences is there but that wasn't surprising.  What surprised me was the amount of resources each page used: images, Flash animations, scripts, stylesheets.  Korean webpages used about 400K of images on average.  What shocked (sorry) me the most was the OhmyNews webpage which used well over a 1 meg of Flash animations in its frontpage.

Is this a glimpse of the Broadband Era?

Note #1: Aside from Korean webpages using much more resources than American webpages, I noticed an interesting differences in the number of resources used.  Korean webpages tended to use many internal frames and numerous JavaScript and CSS files.  I have no clue why though.

Note #2: Washington Post seems to have some JavaScript fanatics. *chuckle*

Note #3: It would be nice if similar numbers can be collected for webpages of other countries so we can compare that with broadband availability to see if there is a correlation.  What countries other than Korea have high availability of broadband?