I did a mobile Google search for "Trump" to bring up the top news section on Google, and was able to find sites (generally non TV-news sites which aren't doing video with every story) that weighed less than 1MB:
Sure. But USA Today EU is not really a fair example. You can‘t really expect publishers to serve absolutely no ads and tracking at all. Unless you want them to die. There are initiatives like Apple News+ and Subscribe with Google but they are not mainstream yet. And individual subscriber options for news portals are way to cumbersome (and perceived as too expensive) for users.
I agree, but the solution is for ad companies to improve so you don't need tons of JavaScript to display an advert. Why can't they be done server side, rather than handled by client side JavaScript? A lot of web apps now employ SSR, so having the adverts use SSR should considerably speed them up
I ran all links below with Google Chrome Tools enabled, no cache. Switched to mobile view to make sure that AMP pages are loaded. Cache disabled to see the actual weight of the page.
So, AMP is worse when served from Google. And on par with non-AMP version
---
The New Yorker AMP: 129 requests (and they keep coming). 796 KB transferred. 1.9 MB resources
The New Yorker AMP not served from Google [3]: 70 requests (and they keep coming). 745 KB transferred. 1.5 MB resources
The New Yorker non-AMP page[4]: 245 requests (and they keep coming). 8.2 MB transferred. 13 MB resources.
So. The only example where the AMP page is significantly better than the non-AMP pages.
---
But the page weight is already accounted for in Google Search algorithms, and The New Yorker page should have been deprioritised from search. It's not, it's in the carousel, it will redirect to the 13MB version on desktop. Meanwhile, as Vox, and USA Today and many many many others show, the regular properly made website will not differ significantly from AMP versions.
