I am not enough of a web-picture-thingy-designer person to know how to actually quantify this, but something about the new layout makes the side banner ads just so much more visually dominant. In fact, I had to go back and look at some old screenshots (after like 4 years of daily FT use...) just to confirm that they were, in fact, there previously. The new layout makes me feel like I need to shift my computer 2 inches to the right in order to center the content in my field of vision. Also, is it just an optical illusion, or is there really such more more white space?