Amazon: Milliseconds means Money

John Gruber resurfaces interesting stuff:

A Google researcher saw a 1/2 second page delay cause a 20% drop in traffic and revenue.

On this post, an Amazon.com employee concurred; In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.

Based on the above quote let's simplify and say revenue drops off linearly with the delay of the appearance of page, with a delta based on the Google research. Taking into account Amazon.com's Revenue for 2007 was USD $14.835 Billion…

500ms = 20% loss = USD$ 2.967 Billion loss 100ms = 4% loss = USD$ 593,400,000 1ms = 0.04% loss = USD$ 5,934,000

By this logic, every extra millisecond the page takes to load costs Amazon.com almost six million lost dollars in revenue.

(btw, I know UI&us is currently loading slowly and realize the hypocrisy! I'm working on this problem with someone already. Any tips are welcome.)

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Confronting Technology

the reaction was confusion or disbelief. Many people were apprehensive confronting a telephone for the first time. The disembodied sound of a human voice coming out of a box was too eerie, too supernatural, for many to accept

Ierley, Merritt.
Wondrous Contrivances: Technology at the Threshold. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2002, 112–118.
Mental and Conceptual Models, and the Problem of Contingency: Charles Hannon.

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