crwdcntrl.net

The pages it appears on are among the most loaded measured

The median site carrying this hostname reaches 22 outside companies over 92 third-party requests, with 5 classified as tracking. Ranked against the other 87 companies in this index, that is 3rd of 88 on median company count, 5th on median request count and 6th on median tracker count.

Those three placements together are the profile of ad-funded publishing: an auction runs on page load, and every bidder, verification vendor and identity service in that auction is a separate connection.

13 companies inside the window, 6 more after it

On the median site here, 13 companies were reached inside the consent window — the highest such median of the 88 companies in this index, shared with cxense.com and dns-finder.com. Early contact of some kind happened on 86 of the 93 sites, 92.5%, which ranks 54th, in the middle of the field.

The more unusual figure is what comes afterwards. The median site adds 6 further companies once the window has closed, so the load is nowhere near finished when the question has been asked. That is the index's own count of late arrivals rather than a difference taken between two other medians. First contact came at a median of 590 ms, with the earliest anywhere in the group at 109 ms.

Four in five of these sites show a banner

A consent tool was detected on 75 of the 93 sites, 80.6% of the group. An IAB TCF consent tool was seen on 61 of them, OneTrust on 12 and Usercentrics on 2 — counts of sites where each was seen alongside the others, not slices of the 75, because a site can carry more than one.

The concentration on the IAB framework matches the rest of the picture. That framework exists to pass a visitor's choices down a chain of advertising vendors in a standard format, and a page with 22 outside companies on it has exactly the kind of chain that needs one.

News, in several languages

elmundo.es is the heaviest example published for this group: 38 companies, 34 of them inside the consent window, behind an IAB TCF consent tool. globo.com reached 36 with 3 inside the window and first contact at 1,733 ms. cbc.ca reached 32 with 11 inside it, indiatimes.com 30 with 20, time.com 26 with 22 at 157 ms, nikkansports.com 23 with 20, businessinsider.com 22 with all 22 inside the window at 224 ms.

The lighter examples are still not light. buzzfeed.com and soundcloud.com reached 15 each, with all 15 inside the window at buzzfeed.com. speedtest.net reached 11 with 9 inside it. allaboutcookies.org — a site about cookies — reached 11 with 7 inside the window, behind a OneTrust banner. donga.com is the counter-example: 11 companies, none of them inside the window, first contact at 3,556 ms, the slowest in this set by a wide margin.

The neighbours are the same auction

Google and Amazon Ads are each present on 61 of the 93 sites, 65.6%. Comscore follows on 48.4% and Criteo on 36.6%. An advertising marketplace sharing the top of the list with Google, rather than trailing it, is a fair summary of what these pages are for.

The other six entries in the top ten are bare hostnames rather than recognisable vendor names, each present on between 19.4% and 44.1% of the group. A co-presence list that is half unnamed hosts is characteristic of programmatic advertising, where the parties a page contacts are decided at load time by an auction rather than chosen in advance by the publisher.

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 61 of these sites
• Amazon AdsTogether on 61 of these sites
• ComscoreTogether on 45 of these sites
• id5-sync.comTogether on 41 of these sites
• fastclick.netTogether on 36 of these sites
• CriteoTogether on 34 of these sites
• ad-delivery.netTogether on 21 of these sites
• btloader.comTogether on 21 of these sites