.ru domains in the Consent Gap Index
.ru is Russia's country-code top-level domain, the address space used by most Russian-language commercial sites, mail providers, hosting companies and portals. This index measured 164 of them, 3.1 percent of the 5,294 sites in the snapshot. The number that shapes every other figure on this page is small: 7. That is how many of the 164 carried any recognised consent banner. The rest of the web's consent apparatus, which dominates measurements of European domains, is simply absent here — and the third-party traffic is not.
Seven banners across 164 sites
Of the 164 .ru sites measured, 7 carried a consent tool this index recognises. Two tools were seen alongside those sites: an IAB TCF consent tool on 6 and CookieYes on 1. There is nothing surprising about the absence. Consent banners are a response to a legal regime, and .ru sites are addressed primarily at an audience that regime does not cover. What makes the number worth stating is that it removes a variable. On most of the web, a page's third-party behaviour and its banner are tangled together — you cannot tell whether the stack is restrained because of the banner or because of the market. Here there is almost no banner to credit.
Early contact on 149 sites regardless
149 of the 164 .ru sites, 90.9 percent, contacted at least one third-party company inside the window before a banner answer could be registered. Among the nine top-level domains in this index that share ranks 7th, meaning six TLDs here show a higher proportion and two show a lower one. On the median .ru site, 4 companies were contacted in that window, and 1 more was contacted after it. Almost all of these sites reach out to somebody in the opening moments of the load, and on almost all of them there was never a dialog to answer in the first place.
Six companies, thirty-two requests
The median .ru site contacts 6 distinct companies, 1 of them classified as a tracker, over 32 requests to third-party hosts. Of the nine TLDs in this index, .ru ranks 3rd on median company count and 2nd on median request count. That combination is the interesting one: the number of separate parties is mid-table, but the number of calls made to them is near the top of the set. A .ru page tends to involve a normal-sized cast that is talked to more often than usual — the pattern you get from analytics and recommendation widgets that report continuously rather than from a long list of one-shot ad partners.
Where the first request lands
The median .ru site made its first third-party request 792 milliseconds into the load, which ranks 4th of the nine TLDs measured here. The fastest first contact on any .ru site in the set was 195 milliseconds. The named sample shows how wide the spread underneath that median is. selectel.ru contacted 10 companies, all 10 of them early, with first contact at 244 ms. mail.ru reached 14 companies, 9 of them early, at 338 ms. ok.ru shows 11 companies with 7 early, at 480 ms. At the other end, dzen.ru and vkontakte.ru each contacted no third party at all inside the early window, with first contact only at 2,744 ms and 2,854 ms.
The light end of the sample
Not every .ru site is a portal. reg.ru contacted a single company, and that one contact was early, at 978 ms. drom.ru shows 4 companies with 2 early. nic.ru shows 6, all 6 early, at 669 ms. yandex.ru shows 7 companies with 5 early at 1,033 ms, and vk.ru 6 with 5 early at 1,488 ms. mts.ru and ivi.ru each contacted 10 companies but with only 4 and 2 respectively landing early, which is what a page looks like when most of its third-party work is deferred until after the first render rather than fired at parse time.
What this section of the index is good for
The .ru group is useful mainly as a control. It is a substantial block of real commercial sites operating almost entirely without consent infrastructure, which makes it a reference point when reading pages where the banner is present and it is tempting to give it credit for restraint.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| mail.ru | 14 | 9 | 338 ms |
| dzen.ru | 7 | 0 | 2744 ms |
| nic.ru | 6 | 6 | 669 ms |
| yandex.ru | 7 | 5 | 1033 ms |
| reg.ru | 1 | 1 | 978 ms |
| mts.ru | 10 | 4 | 1371 ms |
| vk.ru | 6 | 5 | 1488 ms |
| ok.ru | 11 | 7 | 480 ms |
| drom.ru | 4 | 2 | 1089 ms |
| vkontakte.ru | 6 | 0 | 2854 ms |
| selectel.ru | 10 | 10 | 244 ms |
| ivi.ru | 10 | 2 | 1425 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| IAB TCF consent tool | 6 |
| CookieYes | 1 |
Questions
Why do so few .ru sites show a consent banner?
Consent banners exist to satisfy legal regimes that apply to visitors in particular jurisdictions. A site aimed at a Russian-language audience has little reason to deploy one. In this index, 7 of the 164 .ru sites measured carried a tool the crawl recognised.
Does no banner mean more tracking?
Not by these numbers. The median .ru site contacts 6 companies, of which 1 is classified as a tracker — mid-table among the nine TLDs indexed. What is high is the request count, 32 on the median site, second-highest of the nine.
What does the 90.9 percent figure count?
It counts sites, not requests. On 149 of 164 .ru sites, at least one third-party company was contacted inside the early window. It is a property recorded per site.
How large is the sample?
164 .ru sites out of the 5,294 measured in total for this snapshot, which is 3.1 percent of the corpus and rank 4 of the nine top-level domains indexed here by site count.