mrf.io: an uncatalogued hostname on 58 news sites
mrf.io has no vendor entry in this index — no company name, no category, no tracking classification. That means the honest description of it is a description of where it appears, and where it appears is unusually specific: 58 of the 5,294 sites measured, and every site in the sample is a publisher in Spanish, Italian, French or Serbian. It is also a set of sites that nearly all show a banner: 54 of the 58 carried a consent tool the crawl could detect, and 57 of the 58 had a company contacted before that tool could have been answered.
What can be said, and what cannot
The catalogue this index uses names and categorises a few thousand hosts. mrf.io is not one of them, so nothing here establishes who operates it, what it does, or whether it collects anything. It is counted among the companies a page contacted and never among the trackers, which is why the median tracker count on these pages, 3, sits so far below the median company count of 13.
What the measurement does establish is the footprint, and a footprint this concentrated is itself informative. Whatever mrf.io is, it is sold to newspapers.
A Spanish, Italian, French and Latin American news list
The sample: elpais.com, marca.com, as.com, mundodeportivo.com and elconfidencial.com in Spain; lefigaro.fr in France; repubblica.it and ilmeteo.it in Italy; infobae.com, clarin.com and cronista.com in Argentina; blic.rs in Serbia.
Six national dailies, three sports papers, a business paper, a weather service and a tabloid. Twelve of twelve sampled sites in one industry, and no US or UK title among them.
These sites did build a banner
54 of the 58 sites carried a detectable consent tool. An IAB TCF banner was seen on 51 of them, OneTrust on 2 and Iubenda on 1.
Meanwhile 57 of the 58 sites, 98.3%, recorded a company contacted inside the early window — eighth of the 88 companies profiled here. Those two facts sit together and neither explains the other. On much of this index the straightforward reading of early contact is that a site never asked anything in the first place; on this set that reading is unavailable, because nearly all of them did put an interface in front of the visitor. The measurement records the site-level fact and no more: a company was contacted in that window.
Heavy pages that start quickly
The median site here contacted 13 companies over 65 network requests, 26th and 18th of 88 respectively, with a median of 11 companies contacted before the consent window closed — 8th of 88, level with eight others. The median first contact was 452 ms, which is 84th of 88, near the fast end of the index. The fastest recorded was 115 ms.
The sample bears that out. as.com contacted 17 companies with all 17 inside the window and first contact at 270 ms. mundodeportivo.com contacted 21 with 19 inside. cronista.com contacted 18 with 17 inside, blic.rs 19 with 16, infobae.com 16 with 15. These are dense pages that get going immediately, which is the operating profile of an ad-funded newspaper.
The company it keeps
Google was present on 55 of the 58 sites (94.8%), Comscore on 28 (48.3%), Amazon Ads on 19 (32.8%), privacy-center.org on 14 (24.1%), newsroom.bi on 12 (20.7%), ebxcdn.com on 10 (17.2%), cxense.com on 10 (17.2%), Cloudflare Analytics on 9 (15.5%), sensic.net on 8 (13.8%) and Dotmetrics on 8 (13.8%).
Comscore, which measures audiences for the people buying advertising space, is on nearly half of them, and Dotmetrics and sensic.net sit further down the same list. That is what separates a newspaper's stack from a retailer's: the publisher has to prove its readership as well as sell against it.
| Site | Companies | Before consent | First contact |
|---|---|---|---|
| elpais.com | 13 | 10 | 482 ms |
| lefigaro.fr | 8 | 8 | 422 ms |
| repubblica.it | 11 | 10 | 762 ms |
| infobae.com | 16 | 15 | 844 ms |
| marca.com | 17 | 12 | 590 ms |
| as.com | 17 | 17 | 270 ms |
| clarin.com | 11 | 11 | 499 ms |
| elconfidencial.com | 13 | 10 | 757 ms |
| mundodeportivo.com | 21 | 19 | 671 ms |
| ilmeteo.it | 11 | 11 | 284 ms |
| cronista.com | 18 | 17 | 703 ms |
| blic.rs | 19 | 16 | 331 ms |
| Tool | Sites |
|---|---|
| IAB TCF consent tool | 51 |
| OneTrust | 2 |
| Iubenda | 1 |
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 28 of these sites
- Amazon AdsTogether on 19 of these sites
- privacy-center.orgTogether on 14 of these sites
- cxense.comTogether on 10 of these sites
- Cloudflare AnalyticsTogether on 9 of these sites
Questions
What is mrf.io?
An uncatalogued hostname in this index: no company name, no category, no tracking classification. What the measurement can say is where it appears — 58 sites, and every one of the twelve in the published sample is a news publisher in Spanish, Italian, French or Serbian.
Is mrf.io classified as a tracker here?
No, because it has no catalogue entry to classify it either way. It is counted among the companies a page contacts, which is part of why these pages show a median of 13 companies against a median of 3 trackers.
How many of the mrf.io sites showed a consent banner?
54 of 58, and 51 of those were an IAB TCF banner. Only 4 of the sites in this group showed nothing the crawl could detect.
How heavy are these pages?
The median contacted 13 companies over 65 requests, with 11 companies contacted before the consent window closed. That is 26th, 18th and 19th of the 88 companies profiled here.
Do these sites load quickly?
They reach out quickly. The median first third-party contact was 452 ms, which ranks 84th of 88 — near the fast end of this index — and the fastest recorded was 115 ms.