Data Collectors

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Contents
How the statistics were collected
Tracking services
Google
AOL Advertising
Moat
AppNexus
Adloox
YouTube Analytics
Facebook
ScorecardResearch
Yahoo Adversting
Mail.ru Group
Yandex.Metrica
Regions
North America
Europe
Oceania
South Asia
Arab world
Latin America
Africa
Asia
China
South Korea
Japan
CIS
Conclusion

Who owns data owns the world. And with the Internet taking over much of our daily lives, it has become far easier and faster to receive, collect, and analyze data.

The average user cannot even imagine how much data gets collected on them. Besides technical information (for example, about a smartphone) harvested by a manufacturer to patch vulnerabilities, companies also collect and analyze user behavior patterns, including interests, lifestyle, hobbies, and habits. And whereas a few years ago the phrase “Marketers rule our lives” sounded like some kind of Masonic conspiracy theory, today it is an obvious truth. All our online movements and actions on websites are, in their totality, a valuable product.

Why is it important for marketing and advertising agencies to know so much about us? Simple. The more data they have on us, the more accurately we can be assigned to a particular consumer group. And the more nuances about the consumer group are known, the more precisely and efficiently it can be targeted with advertising or new products that meet (or anticipate) its needs.

That is why companies that harvest and analyze data are keen to have up-to-date information about consumer preferences. And that is also why almost all websites deploy trackers that collect information about what users are doing there, what goods they are looking at, etc. All this is relevant not only to the world of sales and advertising, but to our social and political lives, too — trackers on news sites, for example, might potentially manipulate our opinions by tracking our interests and offering news of a certain kind.

That said, the majority of tracking campaigns are aimed specifically at showing ads to a range of target audiences. There are many companies in the world that collect and analyze data and provide full-cycle advertising services, but precious few of them are giants. Yet they account for most of all data collected. Besides global giants, there are regional ones that sometimes collect even more information than their international counterparts (which may indicate a fairly independent online space in that region).

Interestingly, such regions and countries are usually distinctive by their language. For instance, in Russian-speaking countries trackers from Russian companies dominate; in China the same goes for Chinese firms, as it does for Japanese, Korean, and Czech companies in their respective countries. A deeper look reveals the connections between some of these regions. For example, the Top 25 list of trackers in Russia features Chinese solutions. Therefore, when analyzing statistics from different regions and countries, we can infer which companies have the most data about which regions.

How the statistics were collected

For this report we used anonymous statistics collected during the September 2018 – September 2019 period from the Do Not Track (DNT) component, which prevents the loading of tracking elements that monitor user actions on websites. The 100% reference value was all DNT triggerings for all trackers in each region or country. DNT is part of Kaspersky Internet Security, Kaspersky Total Security and Kaspersky Security Cloud solutions, and is disabled by default.

Tracking services

First, we will look at the biggest trackers, which according to our statistics are found in almost every country or occupy the top spots in their home region. Jumping ahead, we will say that almost all of them belong to multinational giants.

Google

Google controls the world’s largest advertising network (see our post explaining how online advertising works for more info about advertising networks) — DoubleClick (in 2018 Google announced plans to rebrand the platform and merge it with its own advertising ecosystem). Hence, Google can be considered right now as the world’s largest harvester of global user data (which we will return to more than once in this article).

Besides DoubleClick, Google has several other trackers that form part of the company’s huge advertising network. The first is Google Analytics, which collects and provides visitor stats to resource owners. The second is Google AdWords, for placing ads, and the third is Google AdSense, for those who sell ads on their own resources.
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