Interesting back-and-forth, but seeing sites like this really makes me appreciate having Readability one button away. The combination of the huge banner and the facepile on the bottom of the screen make it very distracting to read.
Many of our programmers and writers agree. We're an advertising-based business (free online news) so I view this as one consequence of that
A small chunk of these are due to social and other 3rd party features, a good chunk plain old analytics tracking, and another small chunk are due to our "brand lift" advertising guarantees (e.g. in some cases its ensured that readers are actually seeing your below-the-fold advertisements before we charge you for them).
That said, yes, more than a few Ghostery hits are so we can, e.g., buy an ad to reach Forbes readers when you're visiting Adweek.com or something. Ghostery is great and a useful instruction tool for showing the "boiling frog" that is pixels.
My name is Alex Poon. I am the head of engineering at Visual Revenue. Being a provider of analytics and optimization services, it is hard, if not impossible to piggyback on other data providers for data. We pay great attention to user experience of our customers and work to ensure that we don't cause any delay or breakage to their sites. Regarding individual user logs, we delete them immediately after data is aggregated.
