Criteo: six trackers on the median page, and a slow start

Six classified trackers on the median page

The median site carrying Criteo contacted 20 separate companies over 96 requests, and 6 of those companies were classified as tracking against this index's vendor catalogue. That tracker figure is joint-first of the 88 companies here: no other entity in this index sits on pages with a higher median, and two of them — adnxs.com and creativecdn.com — report the same six. Companies contacted ranks fifth of 88; request volume is joint-third, level with Amazon at the same 96.

That combination is what a programmatic advertising page looks like from the network side. Twenty companies is not one ad system; it is an auction with participants, plus the measurement and verification vendors that check the auction happened. Ninety-six requests is the traffic that arrangement generates before a single article has finished rendering.

And yet early contact is rarer here than on almost any other company's pages

On 146 of the 175 sites, at least one company was contacted before a consent banner could have been answered: 83.4%. Among the 88 companies in this index that ranks 86th, where rank 1 is the highest share. Only two entities here sit lower.

So pages as heavy as any in this corpus by tracker count are also, proportionally, among the least likely to have anything reach a third party in the opening window. One reading is that an ad stack of this kind is wired to a consent string and will not bid until it has one, which delays everything downstream of it. This corpus cannot confirm that: it records when connections were opened, not why they waited. What it does show is that heavy and early are separate properties, and this entity has one without the other.

Seven more companies arrive after the window closes

The median number of companies appearing after the consent window had closed is 7 — a figure this index computes per site and then takes the median of, rather than by subtracting one median from another.

Seven is a large number for that measure. It describes a page that is still recruiting participants well after the point where a visitor could have answered, which is consistent with an auction that starts once a signal is available. For anyone reading these pages as a compliance question, this is the half of the load that a banner interaction actually governs.

The banner mix leans on one framework

Consent software was detected on 96 of the 175 sites. The IAB TCF framework was seen alongside on 80 of them, OneTrust on 13 and Cookiebot on 3. Sites can carry more than one banner at a time, so these are sightings rather than shares of the 96.

TCF is the advertising industry's own consent framework: it encodes a visitor's choices into a string that bidders read before they bid. Its dominance in this particular group is the clearest signal in the file that these are pages built to sell inventory rather than pages that happen to carry an ad.

The named sites are mostly news

elmundo.es contacted 38 companies with 34 of them inside the window, first contact at 683 ms, behind an IAB TCF banner. indiatimes.com: 30 with 20. ynet.co.il: 27 with 20. idnes.cz: 24 with 13. cbc.ca: 32 with 11. nbcnews.com reached 33 companies but only 5 inside the window, at 1,071 ms behind OneTrust. globo.com: 36 with 3, at 1,733 ms. vnexpress.net: 11 with 3, at 1,671 ms.

Two sites break the pattern in opposite directions. costco.com contacted 9 companies, all 9 inside the window, first contact at 183 ms and no banner detected — a retailer rather than a publisher, and the fastest of the twelve. donga.com reached 11 companies with none inside the window at all, first contact at 3,556 ms. kaspersky.com and olx.com.br sit in between at 22 with 3 and 13 with 9.

What Criteo travels with

Google was present on 132 of the 175 sites (75.4%), then creativecdn.com on 64 (36.6%), Amazon Ads on 57 (32.6%), adnxs.com on 56 (32%), Comscore on 36 (20.6%), crwdcntrl.net on 34 (19.4%), jsDelivr on 32 (18.3%), adtrafficquality.google on 29 (16.6%), 4dex.io on 26 (14.9%) and the Meta Pixel on 25 (14.3%).

Half that list is made of hostnames with no consumer-facing brand attached. That is the ordinary condition of a programmatic page: the companies a reader could name are a minority of the companies the page contacts.

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 132 of these sites
• creativecdn.comTogether on 64 of these sites
• Amazon AdsTogether on 57 of these sites
• adnxs.comTogether on 56 of these sites
• ComscoreTogether on 36 of these sites
• crwdcntrl.netTogether on 34 of these sites
• jsDelivrTogether on 32 of these sites
• adtrafficquality.googleTogether on 29 of these sites