Google spent a large amount of money purchasing On2. WebP and WebM were a way to show shareholders that they were seeing benefits from the acquisition, and if y

Google spent a large amount of money purchasing On2. WebP and WebM were a way to show shareholders that they were seeing benefits from the acquisition, and if you look at Google’s traffic volume you could make an argument that even a modest size reduction would pay for the engineering time. The problem was that this was basically only true for the largest sites. If you’re YouTube or Netflix, it pays to optimize your video encoding but for most other sites the volume just isn’t there and the performance costs for anyone who uses a CDN cancel it out because you need a lot of traffic for each format before a 10-20% byte size reduction saves more time than the cache misses take.