In economics, there is a concept referred to as “The Laffer Curve,” which illustrates how increases in government tax rates beyond a certain level will ultimately decrease tax revenue. It is often visualized with the following graph:
Beyond tax rate t*, tax revenues actually decrease because economic activity is stifled as a result of excessive tax burdens. You may wonder why we are discussing mundane economic principles, but there is a very good reason: Your website/app follows a similar curve with regard to revenue and media performance.
Consider how this concept applies to your website. You have to compress your images so your site loads as fast as possible, but you don’t want to compress them too much and suffer the consequences of poor image quality. In most cases, we have to guess what our optimal tax rate (bandwidth) is to maximize revenue. If we compress our images too much, visual quality becomes poor and our website/app becomes laughable from the user perspective. Because of this, I call the web performance version of the Laffer Curve “The Laughable Curve” and it looks like this:
