cxense.com in the Consent Gap Index

Thirteen companies before an answer is possible

On the median site carrying cxense.com, 13 distinct companies were contacted inside the window before a banner answer could be registered. Nothing in the index is higher, and crwdcntrl.net and dns-finder.com report the same 13. Set against a median of 17 companies overall, it says that the great majority of the cast on these pages is already involved by the time a reader could plausibly have clicked anything. The number recorded after the consent window closes is 3. Whatever restraint these sites exercise, it is not exercised in the opening moments of a page load.

Nearly every site here has a banner

79 of the 93 sites carried a consent tool, leaving only 14 without one. Four were seen alongside them: an IAB TCF consent tool on 50 sites, OneTrust on 23, Cookiebot on 3 and Osano on 3. That is the combination worth noticing on this page. This is the group most likely to show a dialog and also one of three groups sharing the highest median count of companies contacted before that dialog can be answered, of the 88 companies here. Both facts follow from the same underlying business: European-facing publishers with an ad stack deep enough to require consent machinery, and a page that starts assembling it immediately.

Fast off the line

The median cxense.com site made its first third-party request at 522 milliseconds, which is the 7th-lowest median first contact of the 88 companies here. The fastest recorded on any of them was 80 milliseconds. Early contact happened on 87 of the 93 sites, 93.5 percent, ranking 45th of 88 — unremarkable as a share, but the timing underneath it is not. Half of these pages have reached somebody before half a second has passed.

A publisher-shaped population

The median site contacts 17 companies, 4 of them classified as trackers, over 89 requests to third-party hosts — 9th and 6th of the 88 companies respectively on companies and requests. Google was present on 65 of the 93 sites (69.9 percent), Amazon Ads on 36 (38.7), Comscore on 20 (21.5) and Criteo on 19 (20.4). Comscore's share is the giveaway. Audience measurement of that kind is bought by publishers who need to prove circulation to advertisers, and it appears on roughly one in five sites here.

Twelve named sites, and the range between them

elmundo.es contacted 38 companies with 34 of them early, at 683 ms — the widest cast in this sample and almost all of it inside the window. onet.pl shows 16 of 16 early at 314 ms, nikkansports.com 23 with 20 early at 291 ms, wsj.com 16 with 15 early at 382 ms and fortune.com 15 with 14 early at 162 ms. cnn.com shows 17 companies with 14 early at 522 ms. The deferred end looks different: nbcnews.com contacted 33 companies but only 5 of them early, with first contact at 1,071 ms; cnbc.com 16 with 5 early at 1,053 ms; itmedia.co.jp 14 with 3 early at 1,272 ms. corriere.it sits between at 23 with 11 early, idnes.cz at 24 with 13, and uol.com.br at 16 with 11.

Why the before-answer figure is the one to keep

Site counts are the usual currency of tracker reporting, and by that measure cxense.com is unremarkable — 42nd of 88, on under 2 percent of the corpus. Measured on when contact happens rather than how often it happens, it sits at the top of the index, level with two others. That is the argument for recording timing at all, and it is why this index exists in the shape it does.

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 65 of these sites
• Amazon AdsTogether on 36 of these sites
• ComscoreTogether on 20 of these sites
• CriteoTogether on 19 of these sites
• jsDelivrTogether on 15 of these sites
• adnxs.comTogether on 14 of these sites
• OneTrustTogether on 13 of these sites
• amazonaws.comTogether on 12 of these sites