Why does this site need so much tracking?!

[spinedoc77]

Loading the front page today and I see there are 20 services trying to track me. WTF?!? I let in ads on Macrumors to be a team player because I know you guys have to make money. But man, 20 tracking services just seems very greedy to me. I feel forced to Adblock everything due to the greed.

 

[arn]

Trackers just seem to come along for the ride for what you might consider normal services. Ad networks and analytics packages. When Sprint (or whoever) wants to run a campaign, they add their own pixel to for auditing purposes, to make sure they are getting the right number of impressions. What also happens is if one ad network doesn't have an ad, they send it onto the next ad network, and each of those have to "track" to make sure they don't deliver the same ad to the same person more than X times, etc... Rinse and repeat, and that's how you end up with so many different pixels firing. Aside from that, there are legitimate/intentional "trackers" -- like analytics.

We do offer an ad-free experience for relatively cheap via account upgrades: https://forums.macrumors.com/account/upgrades

We are revamping this paid option and hope to relaunch it in the near future.

 

[spinedoc77]

Trackers just seem to come along for the ride for what you might consider normal services. Ad networks and analytics packages. When Sprint (or whoever) wants to run a campaign, they add their own pixel to for auditing purposes, to make sure they are getting the right number of impressions. What also happens is if one ad network doesn't have an ad, they send it onto the next ad network, and each of those have to "track" to make sure they don't deliver the same ad to the same person more than X times, etc... Rinse and repeat, and that's how you end up with so many different pixels firing. Aside from that, there are legitimate/intentional "trackers" -- like analytics.

We do offer an ad-free experience for relatively cheap via account upgrades: https://forums.macrumors.com/account/upgrades

We are revamping this paid option and hope to relaunch it in the near future.

Thank you, great explanation. I was able to configure a new adblocker and I'm able to view all content, yet not worry about the tracking anymore. I'll look into the paid option so I can support you guys.