Chartbeat: newsroom pages, dense with trackers and quick off the mark

Five classified trackers on the median page — rank 7 of 88

The median site carrying Chartbeat contacted 14 separate companies over 67 requests, 5 of those companies are flagged as tracking in this index's catalogue. That tracker figure ranks 7th of the 88 companies broken out here, where rank 1 is the highest — inside the top ten of the whole index. Companies contacted ranks 20th and request volume 15th.

Five is a dense figure. It describes a page carrying an audience measurement tool, an ad stack and a data platform simultaneously, which is the standard configuration of a commercial newsroom: the same page is being read, counted and sold at once.

And its median first contact ranks 76th of the 88 here

The median first contact on these pages landed at 535 ms. Against the 88 companies in this index that ranks 76th, where rank 1 is the slowest — only twelve companies rank below it. The quickest single site in the group reached out at 100 ms.

Dense and early is an unusual combination. Heavy pages often start late, because a large stack takes time to assemble. These do not. 91 of the 95 sites reached someone inside the opening window — 95.8%, rank 24 of 88 — and on the median site 9 companies had arrived by the time it closed. A median of 2 more arrived afterwards, counted per site and then taken as a median in its own right.

Which company arrived first is not something the corpus records. Early contact is counted per site as a number of companies, never as a list of names, so none of it can be attributed to Chartbeat specifically. What is measured is that it was present on 91 sites where something was reached early.

Three quarters of these sites carry a banner

Consent software was detected on 74 of the 95 sites, roughly three in four. An IAB TCF framework banner was seen alongside on 60 of them, OneTrust on 13 and Usercentrics on 1. Sites can carry more than one banner at a time, so those are sightings rather than shares of the 74.

TCF is the advertising industry's own consent framework: it turns a visitor's choices into a string that bidders read before they bid. A group where it appears on 60 sites is a group that sells programmatic inventory, and taken with the tracker density it explains what kind of page Chartbeat is installed on. It is not a general analytics tool that happens to be popular. It is a newsroom tool, and newsrooms run ad auctions.

Comscore on nearly half of them

Google was present on 72 of the 95 sites (75.8%), then Comscore on 44 (46.3%), Amazon Ads on 32 (33.7%), adnxs.com on 15 (15.8%), the Meta Pixel on 15 (15.8%), Criteo on 14 (14.7%), OneTrust on 12 (12.6%), demdex.net on 12 (12.6%), doubleverify.com on 10 (10.5%) and Cloudflare Analytics on 10 (10.5%).

Comscore at 46.3% is the striking entry. Comscore is the audience measurement firm whose numbers are used to sell advertising against a publisher's reach — a completely different job from Chartbeat's live editorial dashboard, which is why they coexist. One tells the newsroom what is happening now; the other tells the advertiser what happened last month. Nearly half these sites pay for both.

The named sites are all news

bbc.co.uk contacted 6 companies, all 6 inside the window, first contact at 146 ms behind a TCF banner — the quickest of the named group. bbc.com: the same 6 with all 6 inside, at 258 ms. genius.com reached 15 companies with all 15 inside the window at 126 ms behind OneTrust. independent.co.uk: 14 with all 14 inside, at 531 ms. theatlantic.com: 8 with all 8 inside, at 387 ms. lequipe.fr: 7 with all 7, at 432 ms.

The heavier pages split their load. cbc.ca contacted 32 companies with 11 inside the window, at 629 ms. corriere.it: 23 with 11, at 986 ms. uol.com.br: 16 with 11, at 1,194 ms. washingtonpost.com: 12 with 10, at 436 ms behind OneTrust. ft.com is the lightest at 3 companies, all inside the window, at 782 ms. gofundme.com is the only one of the twelve that is not a news publisher: 7 companies with 6 inside, at 817 ms, no banner detected.

Eleven of twelve named sites are newspapers, broadcasters or magazines.

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 72 of these sites
• ComscoreTogether on 44 of these sites
• Amazon AdsTogether on 32 of these sites
• adnxs.comTogether on 15 of these sites
• Meta PixelTogether on 15 of these sites
• CriteoTogether on 14 of these sites
• OneTrustTogether on 12 of these sites
• demdex.netTogether on 12 of these sites