That would get rid of the cruft on the web in a heartbeat.
Every SEO consultant would suddenly have an actual job, playing code golf on CSS and HTML to deliver the content in the minimum number of bytes possible.
I mean, kinda, but not really. You have to cater to it specifically
But your average news page would weigh in roughly the same no matter what the source was. Assuming you'd strip out all the cruft.
For reference, I optimized my website a while ago and ended up with the average page being < 15K.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/the-fastest-blog-in-the-world
Try it, on any connection in normal use today it should load faster than you can blink.
Add a few pictures and it would still work quite comfortably.
Not all of them. For a trivial example, an in-depth article about a topic would be penalized more than a more epidermic one, because it would contain more text, graphs, etc.
> For reference, I optimized my website a while ago and ended up with the average page being < 15K.
I feel you, I absolutely hate that my website uses a bunch of stuff for almost no reason. 80 KB of CSS or 90 KB of font isn't awesome, and I started a project to provide information on how to create lighter websites (https://www.lightentheweb.com/, stalled a bit).
All I'm saying here, though, is that the solution is more nuanced than "heavier = lower". AMP is definitely not a step in the right direction, though. I wonder if Google could give sites that used a specific CSS file and no JS a bump, rather than loading things on their own domain.
But such trivial examples should be trivial to get right no? It's all about the relative weight of the various factors that determine the ranking and a 'lightweight' article could be recognized as such.
How do you recognize which is which?
Sounds like a publisher-assisted "readability view" would solve both problems, though. It would allow the user to view a "lighter" version of the page and search engines could just measure how large the "non-light" version is and penalize accordingly. I'm afraid that would incentivize the publisher to put ads and other crap in the "light" view, though.
You as the publisher/author have to implement an AMP page yourself and then alert Google of its existence.
A lot of the useless pages are 3 stories of scrolling through large images with very little text.
Also, "data" as in tables and small/vector charts isn't all that big.
Tell that to a photographer, designer, artist, illustrator, etc
I don't think that would be a good metric for relevance though and in most case, the total size isn't an issue. Which is why AMP is good, low file size when it's needed, full size when it's not.