Amazon Ads across 292 measured sites

It lives on heavy pages

The median site carrying Amazon Ads contacted 15 separate companies across 78 requests, 4 of them classified as tracking. Against the 88 companies in this index that is rank 12 on companies, rank 11 on requests and rank 9 on trackers — the top fifth of the field on all three, without being at the top of any.

The median count of companies contacted before a consent choice could have been recorded is 10, rank 17 of 88, level with two others. These are pages assembled from many separate businesses, and most of that assembly happens at the start of the load.

Amazon's own sites look nothing like the sites it advertises on

The same company name appears on both, and the pages are not comparable. amazon.com contacted 3 companies in total. amazon.co.uk contacted 4, first contact at 172 ms. amazon.de contacted 4, at 272 ms.

Now the publishers. businessinsider.com contacted 22 companies, all 22 of them before the window closed, first contact 224 ms. wsj.com: 16 companies, 15 early, at 382 ms. washingtonpost.com: 12 companies, 10 early, at 436 ms. weather.com: 13 and 13, at 393 ms. comcast.net reached 21 companies but only 1 of them early, with first contact at 1966 ms.

A retailer's own storefront has one advertising relationship to manage. A publisher's page is a market, and the count reflects that.

Four sites in five carried a banner

240 of the 292 sites had a consent tool the crawl could detect — a much higher share than most entries in this index manage. An IAB TCF consent tool was seen alongside on 163 sites, OneTrust on 66, Iubenda on 4, Usercentrics on 3, Cookiebot on 2 and CookieYes on 1. A site can carry more than one banner and each recognised tool is counted separately, so these are not shares of the 240.

The concentration on the IAB TCF framework is the notable part. That framework exists to pass consent signals between advertising businesses, and its presence on 163 of these sites says these publishers built the plumbing the industry designed for exactly this.

More of this stack waits than usual

269 of the 292 sites had at least one company contacted before a consent choice could have been recorded — 92.1 percent, which ranks 58th of the 88 companies here. Median first contact was 570 ms, rank 73 of 88 where rank 1 is the longest wait. And the median count of companies arriving after the window closed is 2, where most entries in this index sit at 0.

Read together: Amazon Ads sits on pages where a real part of the third-party stack does hold until later. nytimes.com is the clearest example — 4 companies, 1 of them early, first contact at 1997 ms, behind an IAB TCF banner. cnbc.com: 16 companies, 5 early, first contact 1053 ms. rubiconproject.com: 5 companies, 4 early, 1285 ms.

The crawl records this per site, not per company. Amazon Ads was present on 269 sites where contact happened before the banner could be answered; it does not record which companies made that contact.

What else is on the page

Google was present on 207 of the 292 sites, 70.9 percent. Comscore on 98, 33.6 percent. Then a run of advertising infrastructure: crwdcntrl.net on 61 sites, Criteo on 57, fastclick.net on 47, id5-sync.com on 43, ad-delivery.net on 42, btloader.com on 41 and adnxs.com on 40. OneTrust appears on 45 as a co-present name in its own right.

That list is what a monetised publisher page looks like from the outside: one dominant platform, one measurement company, and a long tail of identity and exchange hosts that most readers have never heard of. Amazon Ads is one participant in it, on 292 of the 5,294 sites measured.

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 207 of these sites
• ComscoreTogether on 98 of these sites
• crwdcntrl.netTogether on 61 of these sites
• CriteoTogether on 57 of these sites
• fastclick.netTogether on 47 of these sites
• OneTrustTogether on 45 of these sites
• id5-sync.comTogether on 43 of these sites
• ad-delivery.netTogether on 42 of these sites