When landing on Politico’s home page, your browser loads about 100 pieces of code known as Trackers – behind your back. These trackers are used mostly for advertising: detecting/building user profiles, serving targeted ads, picking up the brand with the best fit on a realtime bidding platform. Other trackers are beacons aimed, for instance, at following the reader from one site to another (the kind you gleefully thank when the North Face jacket you once looked at ends up pursuing you for months). Another kind of tracker is quite indispensable, it involves analytics, counting users, sessions, time spent, etc. With the advent of the social web came all sorts of trackers, users’ connectors to social or affiliation programs. For good measure, some sites also insert chunks of code aimed at organizing A/B Testing — submitting configuration A to a segment of the audience and configuration B to the other to see what works best. (Weirdly enough, A/B trackers are by far the least deployed, accounting for 1% of the total.)
In fairness, Politico is often a fast site and doesn’t always load its full stack of trackers. Most likely, the loading process times out (as show before, when I wanted to make a screenshot of the page, it was stuck to “only” 89 trackers.
Politico might be the most trackers-saturated site of our random sample, but others are not far off. The Daily Mail is one of the most popular news sites in the world with 26m uniques visitors per month at home and 67m UVs in the US, according to Comscore. A single click on its Mail Online flagship sends a whopping 672 requests, but it manages to run them at blazing speed (19 sec loading time) for a feather weight of 3 Mb, including 2.7 Mb for 578 super-optimized pictures that don’t exceed 120 Kb each.
The Mail Online wins many digital speed/weight records. It is one of the most optimized web sites in the world (see our last week story on the obesity plaguing the news industry). But when it comes to monitoring users, The Mail Online also scores high with 79 trackers loaded in one stroke (see below), of which I was able to detail only 63 in my main table:
A broader analysis conducted last week on a random selection of large news sites shows a surprising high reliance on trackers of all types: On average, their home pages load about 30 trackers (article pages usually do less). Here is the ranking:
In total, the 20 sites sample collected 516 trackers. They come from about 100 vendors displayed on this column’s header chart of (As I’m sure I’ll find its way into various presentations in the coming months, the original Keynote file is available upon request — always happy to help.) To measure this, I simply loaded the Ghostery browser extension on my Chrome and Firefox browsers (I wanted to detect discrepancies — none found). Finally, I got a table that looked like this:
The table above is available as a Google Docs Spreadsheet here and in PDF format here.
About 60% of this trackers are ad-related. The crowd is obviously dominated by the two players commanding 60% of the global digital advertising: Google (53 trackers spotted) and Facebook (33). Then comes a cohort of players, some serious, others more questionable.
by Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note | Read more:
Images: uncredited
In fairness, Politico is often a fast site and doesn’t always load its full stack of trackers. Most likely, the loading process times out (as show before, when I wanted to make a screenshot of the page, it was stuck to “only” 89 trackers.
Politico might be the most trackers-saturated site of our random sample, but others are not far off. The Daily Mail is one of the most popular news sites in the world with 26m uniques visitors per month at home and 67m UVs in the US, according to Comscore. A single click on its Mail Online flagship sends a whopping 672 requests, but it manages to run them at blazing speed (19 sec loading time) for a feather weight of 3 Mb, including 2.7 Mb for 578 super-optimized pictures that don’t exceed 120 Kb each.
The Mail Online wins many digital speed/weight records. It is one of the most optimized web sites in the world (see our last week story on the obesity plaguing the news industry). But when it comes to monitoring users, The Mail Online also scores high with 79 trackers loaded in one stroke (see below), of which I was able to detail only 63 in my main table:
A broader analysis conducted last week on a random selection of large news sites shows a surprising high reliance on trackers of all types: On average, their home pages load about 30 trackers (article pages usually do less). Here is the ranking:
In total, the 20 sites sample collected 516 trackers. They come from about 100 vendors displayed on this column’s header chart of (As I’m sure I’ll find its way into various presentations in the coming months, the original Keynote file is available upon request — always happy to help.) To measure this, I simply loaded the Ghostery browser extension on my Chrome and Firefox browsers (I wanted to detect discrepancies — none found). Finally, I got a table that looked like this:
The table above is available as a Google Docs Spreadsheet here and in PDF format here.
About 60% of this trackers are ad-related. The crowd is obviously dominated by the two players commanding 60% of the global digital advertising: Google (53 trackers spotted) and Facebook (33). Then comes a cohort of players, some serious, others more questionable.
by Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note | Read more:
Images: uncredited
