VERTICAL BENCHMARK · NEWS & MEDIA
News & Media
Major news publishers serving AI agents raw HTML at enormous token cost.
Leading news sites waste up to 78× more tokens than needed — TechCrunch, NYT, and others measured with Plasmate v0.5.0.
Avg Compression
39.9x
Peak Compression
77.5x
TechCrunch
Sites Measured
10
News & Media Rankings
Sorted by compression ratio · 10 sites
| RANK | SITE | HTML TOKENS | SOM TOKENS | COMPRESSION |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | TechCrunchtechcrunch.comPeak compression — previously blocked by Cloudflare; fixed in Plasmate v0.5.0 | 108K | 1K | |
| 2 | The New York Timesnytimes.com | 293K | 5K | |
| 3 | Washington Postwashingtonpost.com | 195K | 5K | |
| 4 | BBCbbc.co.uk | 148K | 4K | |
| 5 | Ars Technicaarstechnica.com | 155K | 4K | |
| 6 | Financial Timesft.com | 138K | 4K | |
| 7 | Wiredwired.com | 173K | 5K | |
| 8 | Reutersreuters.com | 142K | 4K | |
| 9 | The Vergetheverge.com | 168K | 5K | |
| 10 | The Guardiantheguardian.com | 366K | 27K |
Cost Savings Estimate
Based on GPT-4o input pricing ($2.50/1M tokens) · News & Media average compression
5,000 pages/day
Est. Monthly Savings
$68285.81
What This Means
News sites are among the most frequently visited pages by AI agents performing research, summarization, and monitoring tasks. The average news publisher sends 41× more data than an agent actually needs — meaning every article lookup costs 41× more than necessary. For publishers serving millions of agent requests per day, switching to SOM could cut AI-related infrastructure costs by over 95%.
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