It's actually much worse than that. Without any kind of ad blocking or privacy extensions, 2 minutes after loading the page, it has made 770 HTTP requests and used 18.5 MB of data. Is this becoming the industry standard now for blogs and news sites?

It is seriously bizarre. Out of control.

It also had an auto-playing video with sound. Very annoying.

And Ghostery is owned by an advertising company that tracks you by default.

Ghostrank? It's disabled by default.

Just checked on a new install, it's disabled.

Ghostrank has never been enabled by default

Is Disconnect.me better in that regard?

Well if you trust that ghostery wont track you if you disable, I think it's pretty good.

I have never heard of them until now to be honest so I'm not the guy to ask.

You can view (and modify) the source code of all Chrome extensions to check that it won't track if the option is disabled:

Windows: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\<Name>\Extensions Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Extensions Linux: ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Extensions/

NoScript master race :P