googletagservices.com: a small set of very busy pages

A narrow footprint on very busy pages

Ranking 75th of 88 by number of sites puts this hostname near the bottom of the index for reach, and its site profile sits near the top. The median page where it appears reached thirteen separate companies, ranking 25th of 88, made 70 requests, ranking fourteenth, and carried two hosts classified as tracking. The two ranks pull hard in opposite directions, 75th of 88 for reach against fourteenth of 88 for request volume, which is a reminder that reach and weight are separate questions. A name that appears rarely can still describe a kind of site precisely.

Nine companies reached before a consent choice

On 57 of the 59 sites, 96.6 percent, at least one company was contacted before a banner could have been answered; two sites had none. That share ranks sixteenth of 88. The median page had reached nine companies inside the window, ranking 20th of 88 and level with four others, and the median count of companies first seen after the window closes is one, so these pages are not quite finished when the question is asked. Median first contact came at 720 milliseconds and the quickest at 75 milliseconds.

Five in six carry a detected consent tool

A recognisable consent tool was detected on 49 of the 59 sites, 83.1 percent. An IAB TCF consent tool was seen alongside thirty of them, OneTrust alongside fourteen, Osano three, and Cookiebot and CookieYes one each. Those counts overlap rather than divide the 49, since a site can present more than one banner. The prominence of the IAB TCF framework matters here: it is the consent format designed for programmatic advertising, and its concentration on these pages says as much about the population as the request counts do.

Almost always with Google, often with a measurement stack

The company catalogued as Google was present on 93.2 percent of the 59 sites. Comscore and Amazon Ads follow on 22 percent each, Cloudflare Analytics and a Google ad-quality host on 18.6 percent, Cloudflare and Amazon CloudFront on 16.9 percent, OneTrust on 15.3 percent, a content analytics vendor on 11.9 percent and a streaming platform host on 10.2 percent. Advertising, audience measurement and consent arrive together on these pages because each one is a requirement of the others.

Twelve publishers, with numbers

The busiest of the twelve is techcrunch.com: 34 companies, every one of them inside the early window, first contact 82 milliseconds after navigation. indianexpress.com reached twenty, all early, at 195 milliseconds. vox.com eighteen, all early, at 261 milliseconds, behind a OneTrust banner. smithsonianmag.com eighteen, sixteen early. conectate.com.do reached fifteen, eight early, at 1,928 milliseconds. Then tandfonline.com ten, all early; britannica.com nine, all early; espn.com eight, all early, at 749 milliseconds; arstechnica.com seven, all early; espn.com.ve seven, five early; hltv.org five, all early, behind Cookiebot; nationalgeographic.com twelve, five early, at 906 milliseconds.

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 55 of these sites
• ComscoreTogether on 13 of these sites
• Amazon AdsTogether on 13 of these sites
• Cloudflare AnalyticsTogether on 11 of these sites
• adtrafficquality.googleTogether on 11 of these sites
• CloudflareTogether on 10 of these sites
• Amazon CloudFrontTogether on 10 of these sites
• OneTrustTogether on 9 of these sites