I firmly believe that a lot of the trackers on these sites are there because the people in charge tried a new ad network or installed a little snippet of JavaScript to do something cool without realizing it came with trackers. Do that for a few years and you end up with a lot of crud. That was one of our design goals when we redid our site a few years back—eliminate all the crud.
The main thing that’s preventing me from ditching Google Analytics entirely is being able to access historical usage data and compare across time. The WordPress Jetpack plugin does analytics as well too, which I turned on a few months back. Once I have a year of data in that for comparison sake, I may turn Google Analytics off. I’ll have to see if Google Search Console is related to that as well, since I do rely on that to tell me when there are crawling errors on the site.
ars technica showed only 2 trackers for me (amazon and double-click). I am a subscriber, though and see no ads. I topped at 57 trackers for yahoo, dropping to 35 for next on the list.
A site like Ars (and the Economist among many others) participates in a ton of ad networks simultaneously, and some of those ad networks required the use of other third parties, and so on and so on. I realize everybody is trying to make some money, but the continued ad-blocking backlash is entirely to be expected when webpages crash or sites don’t load. There are several sites I simply can’t visit (and they are sometimes run by major media companies), because I can’t even scroll down a page without ads leaping at me, filling the screen, shifting the text, etc. If enable ad blocking, the sites won’t load or break entirely.
Such companies make the decision for me. If I am required to let you spy on me to use your website, the short polite answer is “no.” (The actual phrasing usually involves something physically impossible.)
Condé Nast, one of the largest global publishing companies, bought Ars Technica years ago. Among the many publications they own are The New Yorker, Wired, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Epicurious and many more. Condé Nast is owned by Advance publications, which also produces many respected newspapers and broadcast properties. They have a very complicated, and IMHO, interesting, relationship with ad blockers that began well over a decade ago:
Without page views and clicks, they’d be out of business lickity split.
I think it’s a really good step in the right direction, but it’s a little baby step. It doesn’t cover Google services, including YouTube, Blogger, Gmail, Google Maps, etc. And their third party ad networks, like DoubleClick’s AdSense, AdMob, Ad Manager, etc. aren’t a part of the plan either.