Using GDELT’s new HTTP server response logging, we are able to get an intriguing glimpse at the landscape of 48 hours of global news image hosting. The project runs a geographically distributed fabric of web crawlers to monitor online news from throughout the world. The HTTP headers alone totaled more than 730MB, showing just how much invisible information is provided in a typical HTTP exchange to request an online image. Caching software Varnish also appears to have found a warm welcome in the journalism world, with 21.1% of sites running it. In particular, it looks only at the server infrastructure powering static news imagery hosting, which emphasizes high-bandwidth primarily static objects compared with the low-bandwidth highly dynamic article pages.

Source: Forbes March 26, 2017 16:41 UTC