There's no getting away from the fact that animated GIFs are large. They're basically a set of multiple GIFs in one file. If you don't take steps to minimized their size, then you could be sending unnecessarily large files across the Internet. Fortunately, there are a number of ways of keeping the size down:

• Cut down on dithering. Dithered GIFs don't compress as well as non-dithered ones; diffusion-dithered GIFs compress worst of all. Because your GIF is animated, the individual frames aren't usually on the screen long enough for any degradation in quality to be noticed.
• Cut down the number of colors in the image. For instance, if you use a standard palette rather than an optimized one, your GIFs may contain fewer colors and may compress better. There's no hard and fast rule; you may find that a 4-bit optimized GIF is smaller than an 8-bit GIF with a standard palette.

Even 22.4K could be considered too large, and you can often push the size even smaller with a little work. As you can see, the word 'GIF' never needs to be re-drawn and at most six characters change positions between consecutive frames. You could make only the first frame show 'GIF' and make the other frames show only those characters which are moving. Put a white rectangle behind the letters to blank out characters underneath. (In the illustration we've made the rectangle green so you can see it.) For best results you need to turn on Snap to Grid (on the Window menu) and make sure the rectangles are snapped to the grid. You'll also need to make the grid spacing smaller, say to 2 pixels. Lastly set the Overlay ('O') flag in the Frame Gallery for the second and subsequent frames. This brings the size down to 16K.

Also for the first few frames nothing changes. You could delete these intermediate frames and increase the delay after displaying the first frame that shows 'Animated GIF'.