Popular websites are using more cookies

"The number of third-party cookies -- little pieces of software set on users' machines to track web users for ad targeting or site analytics purposes -- rose from 1,887 on the home pages of the most-popular 100 websites [in the US] in May to 2,324 in October, according to research from the University of California at Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. That's a 23% leap.
The Center's Web Privacy Census, conduced each year, crawled the most-trafficked sites on October 24, measuring the number of first-party and third-party cookies spotted on the top 100, top 1,000 and top 25,000 sites. In addition to checking website home pages, which it calls a "shallow crawl," the census project conducted "deep crawls," checking up to six random links on the same sites.
The privacy census measured the top sites as reported by Quantcast. According to the Quantcast site, the top 10 U.S. sites are Google, YouTube, Facebook, MSN, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia, Microsoft.com and Huffington Post. Others in the top 100 include Weather.com, eBay, ToysRUs.com, Walmart.com, IMDB, WebMD, Politico, Flickr, BuzzFeed, BarackObama.com and Time.com."

Source:  AdAge, 27th November 2012