The vast majority of today\u2019s websites are funded by advertising and underpinned by sharing user data with third-party networks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bottom line:<\/strong> at least four in five<\/strong> sites rely on advertising scripts to earn revenue, and roughly three in four<\/strong> share your personal or behavioral data with external networks. This dual model\u2014ads + data\u2014now funds the lion\u2019s share of the Web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roughly speaking, affiliate marketing1<\/a><\/sup> is far less ubiquitous than traditional ad-based models, but still very common among professional publishers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Interpretation:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n So while ~30%<\/strong> of sites treat affiliate commissions as a core revenue driver, the broader practice of embedding affiliate links appears on around 80%<\/strong> of professionally run sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cookieless tracking\u2014techniques that identify or fingerprint you without relying on traditional HTTP cookies\u2014is indeed widespread and harder for end-users to block. Key points:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bottom line:<\/strong> cookieless tracking is now employed on roughly 6 in 10<\/strong> major sites and baked into nearly all large ad-tech stacks\u2014making it significantly more opaque and harder for average users to block than legacy cookie-based tracking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under EU law (GDPR + ePrivacy Directive), almost any technique that links online activity back to an individual\u2014even via \u201ccookieless\u201d means\u2014qualifies as processing personal data. That means:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bottom line:<\/strong> deploying cookieless tracking without a documented, opt-in consent mechanism is a clear breach of EU data-protection law\u2014and regulators expect you to keep precise records of that consent just as you would for traditional cookies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The link points to a CSV-to-JSON converter for cookie consent vendor lists, which can contain thousands of third-party vendors. Vendor lists, often seen in GDPR Cookie Consent Management Platforms (CMP), can indeed be quite extensive. For example, the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework tends to feature lists with over 10k vendors. I’ll check how common it is to have such large lists by searching online for “cookie-law vendor lists length”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How common it is to have such large vendor lists since GDPR CMP lists often have thousands of vendors. The IAB Transparency and Consent Framework has over 1,000, sometimes even hitting 1,800 vendors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Listing thousands of \u201cvendors\u201d in your consent banner isn\u2019t unheard of\u2014here\u2019s the landscape:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bottom line:<\/strong> The master IAB vendor registry itself is<\/strong> in the thousands. Most publishers sensibly prune that down to a few hundred active vendors. Seeing 1,000+<\/strong> on your consent list is unusual but not unprecedented among big media sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notes<\/p>\n\n\n This article ought to be titled do you consent to being monetised, but the editor thought that was too many words …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":925,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"Affiliate marketing<\/strong> is a performance-based online marketing strategy where a business rewards external partners (\u201caffiliates\u201d) with a commission for driving sales or traffic through the affiliate\u2019s unique referral links.And Affiliate Marketing?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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I heard that cookies are on their way out<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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So regardless of the tracking technique it’s all declarable?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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I came across this useful website, https:\/\/www.convertcsv.com\/csv-to-json.htm<\/a>, but noticed that its list of vendors contained thousands of entries. How common would this be? <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The IAB Europe Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) maintains a single Global Vendor List (GVL) that publishers can draw from. As of early\u202f2025, that master list runs to roughly 1,400\u20131,900 registered vendors<\/strong> (each an ad\u2011tech provider, analytics firm, DSP\/SSP, etc.) (IAB Europe<\/a>, IAB Tech Lab<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
While the GVL itself is on the order of thousands<\/strong> of entries, most sites do not<\/strong> expose every single one in their first\u2011layer banner. Industry best\u2011practice (and CMP vendor guidance) suggests curating down to 200\u2013300<\/strong> actually active partners\u2014both to improve performance and to avoid overwhelming users .<\/li>\n\n\n\n
A WIRED analysis of leading sites found some publishers sharing data<\/strong> with over 1,000<\/strong> third\u2011party companies\u2014JetPunk with 1,809 partners, Dotdash Meredith and The Daily Mail each crossing 1,200 (WIRED<\/a>). That full\u2011GVL approach is more common among large media conglomerates relying on many DSPs, ad networks, analytics vendors, and personalization platforms.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Examples:<\/strong>
A blogger includes Amazon product links in a review; when readers buy via those links, the blogger earns a percentage of the sale.
A comparison-site lists travel deals with Expedia affiliate links and gets paid for each booking made through those links.
A YouTuber promotes a web-hosting service with a special sign-up link and receives a fixed fee for every user who subscribes via that link.<\/em> \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Examples:<\/strong>
A blogger includes Amazon product links in a review; when readers buy via those links, the blogger earns a percentage of the sale.
A comparison-site lists travel deals with Expedia affiliate links and gets paid for each booking made through those links.
A YouTuber promotes a web-hosting service with a special sign-up link and receives a fixed fee for every user who subscribes via that link.<\/em>\",\"id\":\"2a0e27d0-cf31-4734-8556-9153d1c62c47\"}]"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bottom-line","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":976,"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions\/976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/likecookies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}