My website embeds videos from YouTube. Right now, I'm using the iframe API for embedding from YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/iframe_api).
The footprint of my website is currently ~1MB. About 300kB is my JavaScript, StyleSheets, images and fonts. Then I have ~105kB for the Facebook API and Google Analytics. All the remaining footprint comes from YouTube.
So that means that the YouTube player is more than 0.5MB (gzipped!). I don't understand how the footprint of a player can be so large.
I'm trying to make my website work really good on mobile devices, so I was wondering if I could reduce the footprint of the YouTube player somehow?
Or is there perhaps some alternative way to show YouTube videos that has a smaller footprint? Note that it must work on mobile devices.