Adobe Fonts, measured on 211 sites
Adobe Fonts is the webfont service Adobe used to sell as Typekit. A site licenses typefaces, adds a stylesheet link, and from then on every visitor's browser fetches font files from Adobe rather than from the site's own server. That fetch is the entire reason the name appears in a third-party log. It was found on 211 of the 5,294 sites measured, 4% of them. Nothing about its numbers is extreme, and that is what makes it useful: it is close to the middle of this index on every measure, which gives you a reference point for reading the entries that are not.
Filed under fonts, not tracking
The vendor catalogue behind this index has an entry for Adobe Fonts. Its category is Fonts and its tracking flag is false, which is an explicit statement rather than an absence of information.
That classification changes one number and not the others. On the median page carrying Adobe Fonts, 7 companies were contacted and 1 of them was counted as tracking. Adobe Fonts is one of the 7 and not the 1. The distinction matters because the two counts answer different questions: how many separate organisations the browser talked to, and how many of them the catalogue recognises as being in the business of following people between sites.
The middle of the table
Across the 88 companies profiled here, Adobe Fonts ranks 57th by median companies (7), 53rd by median requests (40), 37th by median companies contacted before the consent window closed (6, level with 19 others), 47th by the share of its sites with early contact (93.4%) and 37th by median first contact (686 ms). By site count it is 19th of 88.
Five middling ranks in a row is a genuinely useful result. When another entry in this index reports a median company count in the teens, or a first contact past the one-second mark, this is the row to hold it against — an unremarkable commercial site that happens to license its typefaces.
Who else is on those pages
Google was present on 161 of the 211 sites, 76.3%. Then OneTrust on 52 (24.6%), Cloudflare on 39 (18.5%), jsDelivr on 35 (16.6%), Amazon CloudFront on 25 (11.8%), Font Awesome on 23 (10.9%), Amazon Ads on 21 (10%), New Relic on 20 (9.5%), amazonaws.com on 19 (9%) and Cloudflare Analytics on 18 (8.5%).
Font Awesome on 23 of them is the small detail worth pulling out: 23 sites are paying two separate font and icon services to deliver glyphs, which is two sets of connections for one visual result. It is the kind of accumulation that happens when a design system is added on top of an older theme rather than replacing it.
Where it was found
Adobe's own properties are in the sample — adobe.com contacted 3 companies and adobe.io 8 — alongside behance.net, which Adobe also owns, at 8. The rest is a spread of reference and academic sites (doi.org, mit.edu, cornell.edu, ipinfo.io), publishing and services (prnewswire.com, weebly.com, ea.com), and two advertising-industry sites, smartadserver.com and networkadvertising.org.
The heaviest page in the sample is prnewswire.com at 15 companies, 7 of them inside the early window. The lightest is mit.edu at 2. doi.org, the resolver that sits behind academic citation links, contacted 3 companies with first contact at 265 ms.
Early contact, and what it does and does not attribute
197 of the 211 sites, 93.4%, had a company contacted before the consent window closed. On the median site 6 companies were contacted in that window and 1 arrived after it.
Those figures describe the page, not this vendor. The index records that a company was contacted inside the window on a given site; it does not record which company it was, so nothing here says Adobe Fonts was among the early ones on any particular page. What can be said is narrower and still worth knowing: sites that use Adobe Fonts are, as a group, ordinary commercial sites where early contact is the norm.
Consent tools on the same pages
103 of the 211 sites carried a detectable consent tool. OneTrust was seen alongside on 59, an IAB TCF banner on 22, Cookiebot on 11, Osano on 5, CookieYes on 4 and Iubenda on 1.
In the sample that shows up as adobe.io, weebly.com and behance.net running OneTrust while adobe.com itself showed no detectable tool at the time of the crawl. Roughly half of these sites ask a question and roughly half do not, which is close to the split you would expect from a set of sites that is not concentrated in any one jurisdiction.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| adobe.com | 3 | 2 | 1278 ms |
| adobe.io | 8 | 6 | 1024 ms |
| doi.org | 3 | 3 | 265 ms |
| mit.edu | 2 | 2 | 907 ms |
| smartadserver.com | 7 | 7 | 667 ms |
| ea.com | 8 | 7 | 368 ms |
| weebly.com | 4 | 4 | 1030 ms |
| behance.net | 8 | 5 | 433 ms |
| cornell.edu | 5 | 3 | 1184 ms |
| ipinfo.io | 3 | 3 | 201 ms |
| networkadvertising.org | 3 | 3 | 727 ms |
| prnewswire.com | 15 | 7 | 673 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| OneTrust | 59 |
| IAB TCF consent tool | 22 |
| Cookiebot | 11 |
| Osano | 5 |
| CookieYes | 4 |
| Iubenda | 1 |
The six most common are listed. The remaining 1 of 103 sites with a banner carry something outside that six. One tool is recorded per site, so these counts never overlap.
Seen on the same pages
Companies most often contacted by the same sites. Co-presence only — the crawl records what arrived, not who called whom.
- GoogleTogether on 161 of these sites
- OneTrustTogether on 52 of these sites
- CloudflareTogether on 39 of these sites
- jsDelivrTogether on 35 of these sites
- Amazon CloudFrontTogether on 25 of these sites
- Font AwesomeTogether on 23 of these sites
- Amazon AdsTogether on 21 of these sites
- New RelicTogether on 20 of these sites
Questions
What does it mean that Adobe Fonts is not classified as tracking here?
The catalogue records it under Fonts with its tracking flag set to false, so it is counted as one of the companies a page contacts but not in the tracker count. The median page carrying it contacted 7 companies, 1 of which was classified as tracking.
Why does a font service appear in a consent measurement at all?
Because the visitor's browser makes a connection to Adobe to fetch the font files. Any measurement of who a page talks to has to count that connection, whatever the connection is for.
How many Adobe Fonts sites also had Google present?
161 of 211, or 76.3% — the most common co-presence on these pages by a wide margin, with OneTrust second on 52.
Is 211 sites a large footprint?
It is 4% of the 5,294 sites measured, and 19th of the 88 companies profiled in this index by site count.