Why so many trackers Mumsnet?

[Elmerchecks]

I just wondered why such a seemingly friendly site needed to aim so many trackers at users?

Yeah, have you ever tried to turn them all off? It will take you quite a while, as I discovered.

@userlotsanumbers how do you turn them off please?

Their revenue comes from marketing partnerships and advertisers. The big spenders in marketing departments for major brands want to know exactly where their money is going.

I'd expect the tracking cookies are so they can produce aggregated (presumably anonymised) marketing analysis to show their position, e.g. during pitches.
Will be interested to know if I'm right. It's certainly a very resource-heavy website on my phone.

Oh yes please. using MN hangs my internet connection on laptop, I need to keep reconnecting.

MN is the only site I view on ad free browser on my phone. It was causing it to heat up and use tons of battery when I used it on the normal one. Much better.

Hi there, thanks for the question.

Cookies and trackers are used are both for advertising, as well as for functionality of our website (such as logging in) and site analytics.

The advertising trackers/cookies are always encrypted signals which give advertisers the ability to show relevant ads based on your activity on mumsnet or other websites. Trackers include advertisers own signalling technology to understand user interaction with the ads or where this ad has appeared.

These are aggregated and anonymised. Just to put it into context Mumsnet has 148 cookies/trackers
The Guardian has 178
Netmums 736
Daily Mail 1201

So we’re actually on the low side and they shouldn’t be causing connection issues. If you’re having particular problems with MN loading do drop us a line - we’d love to see if we can help.To control which partners track you and what they use your data for, you can select privacy settings at the bottom of the webpage but bear in mind that MN is ad-funded and that’s what keeps it free!

Bump. According to my browser this is how many trackers Mumsnet has used in 90 minutes on MN. Is this accurate?

Hi OP,

Thanks for sharing that with us. We've had a look and we aren't too sure how this tool calculates its tracking attempts (it could be based on page views over a certain period of time, for instance) - but we can confirm that we definitely have 148 partners on site.

According to my browser. Wow