I must not be very clever as it took me 3-4 attempts to understand the before last paragraph (e.g. that without Feather it took 20 minutes while with Feather only 2 minutes to load a video).
Agreed. The wording of the story was a little hard to read. My first time through, it sounded like Feather increased load times, something about geography, and then the story ended without resolution.
Be sure to read it a couple times if you run into the same initial impression.
The clear point being made is that in many parts of the world, the original heavy page was taking a long time to load. Videos would only start after 20 minutes. Feather dramatically reduced the initial load time, but because of what was being measured (video start times), it looked as if Feather had increased load time. In reality, videos were being watched 18 minutes sooner.
I'll rework the wording. Also, it wasn't that the videos were necessarily taking 20 minutes to load. That was simply projections based on the numbers we were seeing at the time. There was not enough data of people actually waiting for 20 minutes to watch something, at least in the small subset of data we pulled at the time.
