I just checked out your site and uBlock blocked 27 requests and noted that loading the page involves 11 domains. Do you have any insight into what's being blocked and why so many domains are being accessed?
Hey there, I appreciate you bringing this to my attention. (Sorry I didn't see this sooner—I was keeping an eye on the thread just in case I got any comments.)
I'm using Ghostery on my machine rather than uBlock, and on the front page, I count eight items—standard social fare like Pinterest and AddThis, along with some advertising-related stuff like Skimlinks (I use some affiliate marketing, and am transparent about this.)
Beyond Google Analytics, one tool that I in fact do use specifically to track things is HubSpot's free LeadIn service, which mostly exists to tell me how people end up subscribing to the newsletter.
But on the article page, it's showing 46. Two things are different there: One, I have a single Google AdSense ad, which I only added a few weeks ago because I was seeing some traffic surges, and second, I have Disqus advertising turned on.
Just for kicks, I commented out Disqus for a second, and reloaded the page. That 46 number went down to 15. I'm assuming that if I turned off the single Google ad I use, that 15 would go back down to 8.
So there's your answer. Disqus is shoving a ton of ad trackers onto my users. I should really turn that off—I'm not making that much on it anyway.
(As for the number of domains used, I will point out a couple things: I'm using a font family that's not through Google, I appear to be using a third-party jQuery, and I'm using Cloudinary for image hosting—the latter because I use a lot of GIFs.)
Edit: For the sake of comparison, I loaded a couple of other pages to see how many trackers they had. The front page of Mediaite.com had 59, while an average article page had 81. Pitchfork.com (which doesn't have comments) had 22 on its front page and 20 on its article pages. And Washington Post had 17 on its front page, 42 on its article pages.
I really appreciate you taking the time to check into this. The weight of the Disqus ads is a little surprising. Really interesting answer though, thanks.
Do you do this to every site? Everything I see is stuff like Google Analytics and Share this. Check your logs before asking a question you can answer yourself. If you have a specific complaint, then contact the admin or owner.
I generally run with uBlock on, so I guess I do it to every site.
I just learned about the log today from another comment. Even after reading it, I'm not sure all of what it is doing. Since the owner of the site is posting here, I thought it would be a good opportunity to ask. If anybody knows why the blocked count continues to climb even after the page is loaded, it would be the creator. It's always interesting to me to hear why something was built the way it is.
BTW, I'm not really complaining about anything.
Also, I just looked at the logs again and I don't see 11 different domains. So, yeah, even with the log it's confusing to me.
So now that I look at it, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Judging by what's red, I think uBlock is mostly stopping the blog from tracking me.
Also, the number of blocked requests is now 36. Not sure why it would keep climbing after the page is loaded.
Sometimes people defer loading of unnecessary JavaScript, like trackers, until after the page is "loaded", so that's why you might see the page appear to finish loading then more blocked requests appear in the seconds that follow.
