.de websites
.de is Germany's country-code domain ending. A web address ending in .de was registered through the German registry, and German publishers, retailers, broadcasters and telecoms use it as their main address rather than a .com. This index measured 91 .de sites out of 5,294, which is 1.7 percent of the corpus and places the ending eighth of the nine domain endings covered here by site count.
Nothing here is lighter, on any of the three weight measures
On every measure of how much a page pulls in from elsewhere, no domain ending in this index is lighter than .de. The median .de site contacted 3 companies, made 14 third-party requests, and carried 0 companies classified as trackers. The 0 trackers is ninth of nine outright, with nothing else at zero; on companies and on requests .org matches .de exactly, at 3 and 14, so those two positions are shared rather than held alone. A median of zero trackers means at least half the sites in this set carried none at all. Whatever else is true of German web publishing, the pages in this sample are not assembled from long chains of third parties.
Light, but not late
The same set ranks second of nine for the share of sites where a company was contacted before the banner window closed: 88 of 91 sites, or 96.7 percent. Median first contact came at 519 milliseconds, eighth of nine, meaning outside contact typically begins earlier on a .de site than on almost every other ending measured here. The earliest recorded across the 91 was 46 milliseconds. At the median, no company is contacted after the window closes. So the pattern is not a small amount of third-party activity spread out over a long load. It is a small amount, arriving immediately, and then nothing.
Banners on just over half
50 of the 91 sites carried a recognisable consent tool. The IAB TCF framework signal was seen on 34 of them, Usercentrics on 10, Cookiebot on 3, OneTrust on 2 and Klaro on 1. These are counts of sightings rather than shares of a whole, since one site can run more than one consent layer. The concentration is the notable part: the TCF signal turned up more than twice as often as all four named vendors combined, which is what you would expect from a set weighted towards ad-funded news publishers, since that framework exists to pass a consent state along the advertising chain.
The range inside one country ending
The examples show how little the suffix predicts. spiegel.de registered a single company. t-online.de registered 2, amazon.de and zalando.de 4 each, telekom.de 3. At the other end merkur.de registered 13, all of them inside the window, and it began earliest of these examples at 267 milliseconds; n-tv.de registered 10, also all inside. ebay.de was the latest to begin, at 1,377 milliseconds, with 6 companies of which 4 were inside the window. welt.de and ebay.de are the two examples where the early count sits clearly below the total. bild.de, focus.de and kleinanzeigen.de fill the middle at 6, 5 and 4.
Why the ending is a weak predictor
A domain ending is a registration fact, not a technical one. Nothing about .de constrains what a page is allowed to load, and the 91 sites here run from a telecom to a classifieds marketplace to several national news brands. The low medians therefore describe this particular sample of German-registered sites, not a property of the suffix, and a different 91 would give different numbers. What travels better is the timing result. Regardless of how heavy the page was, 88 of the 91 had already contacted someone before the window closed, and that is the figure worth carrying away. How the window is defined is set out at /consent-gap; MurmStack runs the same measurement live on whatever page you have open.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| t-online.de | 2 | 2 | 360 ms |
| amazon.de | 4 | 4 | 272 ms |
| telekom.de | 3 | 3 | 302 ms |
| bild.de | 6 | 6 | 451 ms |
| welt.de | 4 | 2 | 701 ms |
| ebay.de | 6 | 4 | 1377 ms |
| focus.de | 5 | 5 | 474 ms |
| kleinanzeigen.de | 4 | 4 | 746 ms |
| n-tv.de | 10 | 10 | 644 ms |
| spiegel.de | 1 | 1 | 583 ms |
| zalando.de | 4 | 4 | 679 ms |
| merkur.de | 13 | 13 | 267 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| IAB TCF consent tool | 34 |
| Usercentrics | 10 |
| Cookiebot | 3 |
| OneTrust | 2 |
| Klaro | 1 |
Questions
Are German .de sites tracker-free?
No. The median is 0 trackers, which means at least half the 91 sites carried none, and says nothing about the other half. The median number of companies contacted is 3, and 88 of the 91 sites had contact before the banner window closed.
Why is the IAB TCF entry not a vendor name?
The Transparency and Consent Framework is an industry specification that many different banner products implement, so a site showing the signal is running some tool that speaks it. The crawl records the signal rather than guessing which product produced it. It was seen on 34 of the 50 .de sites that carried a consent tool.
Does a 519 millisecond median mean these sites are slow?
No. It measures how long the page waited before its first request to a domain other than its own. A low figure means outside contact began early, not that the page took a long time to render.
How many .de sites are in this index?
91, out of 5,294 sites measured in total, which is 1.7 percent. That places .de eighth of the nine domain endings covered here by count.