Each Friday, 'New York Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman and NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom. This week: "The number of people coming to our website has really popped. The TechCrunch blog, a respected source, attributes this to the dismantling of our Times Select pay wall. It's reasonable as a hypothesis but premature as a conclusion. Lots of things affect Web traffic so it's hard to isolate individual factors. One thing that obviously has a big impact is news. Here's another, maybe not so obvious: Page weight.... In June, the home page took an average of 1.52 seconds to load. Heavy. For September, the first month our new page-lightening technology was fully installed, the load time dropped to 1.18 seconds, roughly a 22% improvement even though our page views grew by 19% over the same period (574 million in June to 683 million in September). Our performance has continued to improve since then: October: 1.15 seconds, November: 1.14, and so far in December: 0.96, while traffic continues to grow."