IT: Little things can have massive results

Time ago I heard about some ESPN & CSS thing going on. I remember something about ESPN saving terabytes a day in bandwitdh usage by using CSS for layout instead of tables.

So know I did some research and long story short:

• ESPN website gets about 1 to 1.3 billion page views per month.
• By using CSS...
  

• Page reduction (estimate) 50 KB
• Page views/day 40,000,000
• Projected bandwidth savings:
  

• 2 terabytes/day
• 61 terabytes/month
• 730 terabytes/year (784,000,000,000 KB)

So... switching from Tables to CSS styling is not such a little thing, and it takes tons of work when you change some existing website and try to migrate it to CSS layout. But the concept of just presentation and content-structure separation can make such an impact can tell you that you don't need some costly data mining algorithms for getting some nice returns on investment.


Sources:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview