On Saturday morning, while failing miserably at getting out of bed, I did the Thing that supposed Experts supposedly tell me I should’t do: I lounged around and read things in bed on my mobile. I clicked a link and immediately saw an article pop up — the blue bar that usually crawls lethargically along the top of my screen had suddenly decided to sprint.

I hadn’t fully registered how laggy mobile browsing normally is until suddenly it wasn’t. What explains this little miracle? Well, the short answer is that I was getting what I paid for.

Last week (some corner of) the internet got into a conversation about slow loading speeds on mobile devices. Nilay Patel at the Verge seems to have set things off with his article The Mobile Web Sucks.

Les Orchard on his excellent blog replied that, in fact, it’s really the Verge’s web that sucks. In short, Orchard loaded a Verge page on his mobile device and tracked exactly why the page was so resource-heavy and took so long to load. The text of the article was 75 kilobytes of data; that would have loaded almost instantly on Orchard’s connection.

But alongside the article his phone was being forced to load a whole raft of images, spyware and kitchen sinks, and the final tally was ugly: the site took over 30 seconds to load, and forced 9.5 megabytes (that’s 9,500 kilobytes) of data over Orchard’s mobile connection — whether he liked it or not.

Which brings me back to my Saturday morning reading. The article I was clicking (for the record, this fascinating number about Mumbai’s legendary Dabbawalas, who distribute 130,000 home-cooked lunches to office workers every day) was coming to me through 1Pass, a service I work for that enables readers to conveniently make tiny payments for individual articles from top publications.

Since the user is paying directly to support the writers and publishers of the article, there’s no need for any kind of advertising and so no need for the bloat that normally causes articles on my phone to load so painfully slowly. Our tech guru, Jake, pulled the following figures for the load weight of a standard 1Pass piece:

For a reader who had never loaded a 1Pass piece before, the entire loading weight would have been 375 kilobytes; Orchard could have loaded it in under a second. In his blogpost, Orchard raises a question that’s long been on our lips: “Maybe paying for the web can be better?” He mentions one project, Subscribe2Web, that has calculated that “you’re worth about $6.20 per month across publishers via advertising revenues. What if you paid that much into an account yourself every month and used a mechanism built into your browser to distribute that money?”

I think that one of the most notable things about the $6.20 figure is that many of us are lucky enough financially that we’d happily pay much more than $6.20 a month just to make all the bloat — both visual and pageload-wise — of the ad-based internet go away. An average article on 1Pass costs 25¢ to read, and that 25¢ not only gives you access to an article that would otherwise have been stuck behind a paywall (and supports the person who wrote it, making it possible for more such writing to happen in future) but gives you the article in beautiful, pristine, clutter free-form where you can enjoy the words and thoughts without the least bit of distraction. Just the way the writer and Saturday morning intended it.

— Uri Bram

PS: if you’d like to try loading a 1Pass page yourself, give this one a look:

The Baltics: Putin’s Next Target — from Prospect Magazine