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The Margin
About

Privacy

Updated October 14, 2026.

The Margin has no accounts, no comments, no newsletter sign-up and no ads. It does not set cookies. Two things measure visits, so I can see which pages people read and for how long.

Time on page (our own counter)

A small script on every page (/engaged.js) counts the seconds a page is open in a visible tab and in use. The clock pauses when the tab is in the background and after 30 seconds without a scroll, click, tap, key press or mouse move. When you leave the page or switch tabs, it sends one short message to this site with:

  • the page address, without anything after a ? or #
  • the number of seconds counted, capped at 30 minutes
  • how far down the page you scrolled, rounded to 0, 25, 50, 75 or 100 percent
  • the name of the site that linked you here, such as google.com or t.co, and nothing else from that link
  • whether the device looks like a phone, a tablet or a computer

The server adds the two-letter country code that Cloudflare already works out for every request, and keeps the record in Cloudflare Workers Analytics Engine for three months. It does not keep your IP address, your browser's user agent, a cookie or any ID, and it does not try to recognize the same reader twice. Records that look like search crawlers or other automated tools are dropped. If you come back to a tab after the message was sent, a second message adds the extra seconds to the same page.

The script does nothing at all if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.

Cloudflare Web Analytics

The site is served by Cloudflare, which adds its own Web Analytics script to each page. It reports page views, the linking site, country, browser, device type and how fast the page loaded, and Cloudflare keeps it for six months. Cloudflare describes how it collects this on its Web Analytics page.

Other requests your browser makes

Fonts load from Google Fonts, team logos and live scores on some pages load from ESPN, and player photos load from ESPN, NFL.com and NBA.com, so those services see a request from your browser as they would for any site that uses them. Links to other sites, including share buttons, only send you there when you click them.

Who sees the numbers

Only me, in totals per page and per day: views, how long people stayed, how far they scrolled and which sites sent them. Nothing is sold or shared. Questions go to @themarginsports on X.