Total size doesn't equal size of elements?

According to the Page Weight report, looking at data for the last year, the median web page size is 1950.4 KB.

I originally assumed that the resources requested by the page added together would equal this median number.

  • CSS Bytes - 63.2 KB
  • Font Bytes - 121.7 KB
  • HTML Bytes - 27.2 KB
  • Image Bytes - 982.3 KB
  • JS Bytes - 412.6 KB
  • Other Bytes - 0.8 KB
  • Video Bytes - 1372.8 KB
    TOTAL: 2980.6 KB

Can someone explain the difference between these numbers? Or is this simply an artifact of reporting the median (i.e. there is no mathematical requirement that the median be a total of the medians of the components)? For context regarding why I care, please see my next post, which I will make after creating this topic. Thanks!

You’re correct; summing medians of each resource does not necessarily add up to the median total. What you might be looking for is the average: https://legacy.httparchive.org/interesting.php#bytesperpage. Averages can be misleading so that’s why we’re using medians now.