That's completely nuts. Tried to upload it* to http://compresspng.com/ , and after what seemed like a few hours (Australian upload on cable is 100x slower than the download) I got a 72% reduction in size to 1604kb. That is, an identical image if you absolutely must insist on that quality.

Without having a checked, I'd venture to say that a 200-300KB jpeg would look very close and more than good enough for the purposes of the article header.

*) https://blog.coralproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/hat...

people are not even trying, this image could be a jpg of <=500kb with same quality.

use png for icons, text, graphs , but save images as jpg.

i see this many times, my rule is to never exceed 150 kb for those "retina" images

They seem to host on Google cloud, so if the story becomes popular enough here it could give them some incentive to change that, considering Google's traffic fees..

I dropped the site’s tech contact an email & they’ve fixed it now.