mail.ru, and the pages that take a second to reach out
mail.ru is a Russian web portal — mail, news, search, games — now part of the VK group. Its hostnames appear in other sites' network logs when a page loads something from it: a script, a counter, a widget, an embedded player. This index has no vendor entry for the domain, so it is counted as a company a page contacted and not as a tracker. It was recorded on 92 of the 5,294 sites measured. What stands out is not the footprint but the clock: the median site carrying it waited 1,135 ms before contacting any third party at all, the highest median first-contact time of the 88 companies profiled here.
A second is a long time on a web page
1,135 ms is the median across the 92 sites; the fastest single first contact recorded on any of them was 153 ms, so the group is not uniformly slow. But the sample is full of pages that take their time. vk.com made first contact at 3,653 ms, cdnvideo.ru at 3,486 ms, userapi.com at 3,153 ms, vkontakte.ru at 2,854 ms, dzen.ru at 2,744 ms and timeweb.ru at 2,072 ms.
No other company in this index has a higher median on that measure. A page that reaches nobody for two or three seconds has usually rendered its own content first and left the external work until afterwards — deferred scripts, lazy-loaded embeds, players that only connect when you press play. The crawl records when the contact happened, not why it happened then.
Which is why the early window is nearly empty
Those same six sites — dzen.ru, vk.com, userapi.com, vkontakte.ru, timeweb.ru and cdnvideo.ru — recorded no company at all inside the early consent window. That is half the sample.
Across the full 92, early contact was recorded on 78 of them, 84.8%, which is 82nd of the 88 companies here. selectel.ru shows the opposite pattern within the same group: 10 companies, all 10 inside the window, first contact at 244 ms. The median site had 5 companies inside the window and 2 arriving after it.
Almost nothing to answer
4 of the 92 sites carried a consent tool the crawl could detect, all four an IAB TCF banner.
On the other 88 there was no banner in the page at all. The early-contact figure for this group therefore describes the opening moment of a page rather than a period in which a question was pending — the measurement is the same, the situation is not. It is the cleanest example in this batch of why the two things have to be reported separately.
A stack that is not the western default
The companies most often present alongside mail.ru: Yandex Metrica on 71 of the 92 sites (77.2%), yandex.com on 59 (64.1%), Google on 35 (38%), vk.com on 29 (31.5%), adriver.ru on 23 (25%), yandex.net on 20 (21.7%), yastatic.net on 20 (21.7%), mindbox.ru on 13 (14.1%), yadro.ru on 13 (14.1%) and tns-counter.ru on 12 (13%).
Yandex Metrica was present on twice as many of these pages as Google. That is the finding: Google sits third here, on fewer than four sites in ten, behind two Yandex properties, on a set of pages where a search engine, a mobile operator and a national social network are all in the sample. The pages are heavy enough — a median of 9 companies over 40 requests, with 2 classified as tracking — they are simply heavy with different companies.
Where it was found
The sample is Russian-language services almost end to end: portals and social platforms (dzen.ru, vk.com, vk.ru, vkontakte.ru, ok.ru, userapi.com), a search engine (yandex.ru), a mobile operator (mts.ru), a streaming service (ivi.ru), and three infrastructure companies (selectel.ru, timeweb.ru, cdnvideo.ru).
The heaviest page in the sample is ok.ru at 11 companies with 7 inside the early window; mts.ru, ivi.ru and selectel.ru each reached 10. By site count mail.ru is 43rd of the 88 companies here, and 1.7% of the crawl — a middling footprint attached to an unusual timing profile.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| dzen.ru | 7 | 0 | 2744 ms |
| yandex.ru | 7 | 5 | 1033 ms |
| vk.com | 6 | 0 | 3653 ms |
| mts.ru | 10 | 4 | 1371 ms |
| userapi.com | 6 | 0 | 3153 ms |
| vk.ru | 6 | 5 | 1488 ms |
| ok.ru | 11 | 7 | 480 ms |
| vkontakte.ru | 6 | 0 | 2854 ms |
| selectel.ru | 10 | 10 | 244 ms |
| ivi.ru | 10 | 2 | 1425 ms |
| timeweb.ru | 6 | 0 | 2072 ms |
| cdnvideo.ru | 7 | 0 | 3486 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| IAB TCF consent tool | 4 |
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.
- Yandex MetricaTogether on 71 of these sites
- yandex.comTogether on 59 of these sites
- GoogleTogether on 35 of these sites
- yastatic.netTogether on 20 of these sites
- yadro.ruTogether on 13 of these sites
Questions
What is mail.ru doing in a third-party report?
A page has loaded a resource from it — a script, an embed, a counter. That connection is recorded as a company the page contacted. There is no vendor catalogue entry for the domain in this index, so it carries no category and no tracking classification.
Why is the first contact so late on these pages?
The measurement records the timing, not the cause. A median of 1,135 ms is consistent with pages that render their own content before loading anything external, and six of the twelve sampled sites contacted nobody at all inside the early consent window.
How many of the mail.ru sites showed a consent banner?
4 of 92, all of them an IAB TCF banner. On the remaining 88 there was nothing detectable for a visitor to answer.
Which companies were most often on the same pages?
Yandex Metrica on 71 of the 92 sites, yandex.com on 59 and Google on 35. Yandex Metrica was present on twice as many of these pages as Google.