500ms is a lot of time for both customer and vendor. In questioning whether these 'millisecond timings' make a difference to revenue it helps to think of how it feels at the other end of the transaction, as a customer.

500ms sadly is a lot of time if you are trying to buy tickets for Glastonbury. Click a fraction of a second too late and your name is not down. Same with eBay, click a fraction of a second too late and someone else gets that vital bit of junk you thought you needed.

Last year when crypto-ponzi-schemes were all the rage the pump and dump schemes gave people that were in on the scam different levels of access.

In one scheme if you brought a few 'friends' in to share the wealth then you would get the notification of when to buy a little bit earlier. If you brought 150 of your 'friends' along then you would get the message a whole three seconds earlier. If you brought 500 to the party then you would get the supreme advantage of getting the message an incredible 3.5 seconds earlier.

500ms really determined if you ended up 'lambo to the moon' or a 'bag holder'. Funny. Most of the people in on this were just kids in their mum's basement on whatever internet connection was available. Nonetheless there was a considerable premium on 500ms which you would not think would be that big a deal given the other latencies in the system.

https://theoutline.com/post/3074/inside-the-group-chats-wher...

Shopzilla reported similar results with intentionally slower pageloads materially impacting revenue, though the study was only revealed during the talk and not in the abstract —- https://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity/velocity2009/public...