M MurmTools

Vimeo

Vimeo is a video host. When it turns up in a request log or a cookie report it is almost always because someone embedded a player — a product demo, a lecture, a public information clip — and the page has to fetch that player from Vimeo to show it. This index recorded it on 55 of the 5,294 sites measured, 1%. It is one of the entities here with a catalogue entry that is explicitly not flagged as tracking: category video, no tracking classification.

The pages carrying it are among the quietest in this index

Rank the 88 companies here by the median number of companies contacted on the pages they appear on, and Vimeo comes 83rd, at 6. By median requests it is 80th, at 26. By median trackers it is 79th, at 1.

That is a consistent position near the bottom of the field on every load measure, and it follows from what an embed is. A video player is added because someone wanted a video on the page, not because someone was building a measurement stack. It arrives one at a time, and it does not bring a supply chain with it.

The co-presence profile says the same thing. Google was on 36 of the 55 sites, 65.5%, OneTrust on 13, 23.6%, and after that it is fonts and delivery networks: Adobe Fonts on 11, Amazon CloudFront on 11, Cloudflare on 10, unpkg on 6, Font Awesome and jsDelivr on 5 each. Meta reached 6 sites, 10.9%, and Google Tag Manager 9, 16.4%.

Two populations: institutions and advertising technology

The sample splits cleanly. On one side are public and academic bodies with something to show: ftc.gov at rank 1699, columbia.edu at 983, orcid.org at 1941. On the other are advertising and media technology companies embedding video on their own marketing sites: pubmatic.com at 242, casalemedia.com at 408, outbrain.com at 662, adswizz.com at 2318, flashtalking.com at 921. Design and communications tools fill the middle — figma.com at 866, agora.io at 941.

The two privacy vendors in the list are worth noting as sites in their own right: trustarc.com at rank 1827 contacted 4 companies and truste.com at 1991 also 4.

What unites them is not sector but page purpose. These are pages built to explain something, and an embedded video is part of the explanation.

When contact happens, it happens early

On 50 of the 55 sites, 90.9%, at least one company was contacted before a consent banner could have been answered. The median site had 5 companies inside that window and added none after it closed — the median count of companies appearing after the window is 0.

The examples show the pattern almost without exception. pubmatic.com contacted 6 companies with all 6 inside the window, agora.io 7 of 7, adswizz.com 8 of 8, ftc.gov 6 of 6, columbia.edu 5 of 5, orcid.org 5 of 5, figma.com 4 of 4. On a page with a short list of third parties and no deferred loading logic, the whole list tends to be reached at once.

The one clear exception runs the other way: casalemedia.com contacted 5 companies with none inside the window and made first contact at 2,373 ms.

Timing: 746 ms at the median

The group's median first third-party contact came at 746 ms, 31st latest of the 88 companies in this index, and the earliest recorded anywhere in the group was 177 ms.

The named examples spread widely around that median: 191 ms on pubmatic.com, 220 ms on orcid.org, 323 ms on trustarc.com at the early end; 1,280 ms on columbia.edu, 1,326 ms on outbrain.com and 2,373 ms on casalemedia.com at the other. An embedded player is not usually the first request a page makes, and on these pages it is not what sets the pace either.

Consent tooling on 23 of the 55

A consent tool was detected on 23 sites. OneTrust was seen alongside on 13 of them, Cookiebot on 5, Osano on 2, CookieYes on 2 and an IAB TCF consent tool on 1 — overlapping counts, since one page can carry more than one banner product.

In the examples, casalemedia.com, outbrain.com, orcid.org and adswizz.com were recorded with OneTrust; ftc.gov, columbia.edu, figma.com, pubmatic.com, agora.io, flashtalking.com, trustarc.com and truste.com with none detected. Several of those are US institutional sites, where a European-style banner is not the default expectation.

Highest-ranked sites where this was seen
SiteCompaniesBefore consentFirst contact
pubmatic.com66191 ms
casalemedia.com502373 ms
outbrain.com331326 ms
figma.com44896 ms
flashtalking.com1512746 ms
agora.io77814 ms
columbia.edu551280 ms
ftc.gov66615 ms
trustarc.com44323 ms
orcid.org55220 ms
truste.com44597 ms
adswizz.com88645 ms
Consent tools seen on these sites
ToolSites
OneTrust13
Cookiebot5
Osano2
CookieYes2
IAB TCF consent tool1

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.

Questions

Why is Vimeo on a site I visited?

Because the page embeds a video hosted there. The player has to be fetched from Vimeo for the video to play, which is what puts the host in the request log.

Is it classified as a tracking vendor here?

No. It has a catalogue entry with the category video and no tracking flag. That is a statement about what the product is for, not a guarantee about what any given embed does on any given page.

Do pages with a Vimeo embed contact more companies?

The opposite, as a group. The median is 6 companies over 26 requests, placing these pages 83rd of the 88 companies in this index by median company count and 80th by median requests.

Which sites in the sample are they?

A mix of institutions — ftc.gov, columbia.edu, orcid.org — and advertising technology companies embedding video on their own marketing sites, such as pubmatic.com, outbrain.com and adswizz.com.

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