Wat-Not Staff
Although news has emerged that Google will not remove third-party cookies from its Chrome web browser—despite nearly five years of assurances to the contrary—the funding of journalism on the open internet is still in doubt.
The majority of publisher advertising revenue is derived from third-party cookies, which allow marketers to target readers with more relevant content. “We’ll introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing,” according to a statement from Google. It remains to be seen, though, if this ends up being a worse or better option for publishers than making them utilise Google’s Privacy Sandbox cookie-killer technology.
It is “unclear exactly what this means,” according to consultant Matthew Scott Goldstein, who has previously written for Press Gazette about how publishers may avoid “extinction” amid the end of cookies. This statement encapsulates the opinions of many.
He also added “We need another two or three weeks to find out what the fallout really is. However, my concern is this is another meteor hitting the publisher ecosystem of the internet.”
“Our industry has made huge progress over the past four years and this process has irrevocably reshaped the digital ecosystem,That doesn’t just evaporate with the removal of Google’s cookie deadline.”
When Press Gazette called a number of mass market, ad-funded news outlets on Tuesday, few of them were open to provide their opinions on the cookies story.The development had little effect on the stock market. By Tuesday’s market closing, shares of Reach, the biggest publicly traded news publisher in the UK that mostly makes its money online from display advertising, had dropped by 0.3%.
A representative for Future, a magazine company that also makes a sizable profit from display advertising, stated that “details in the blog post remain light, and we continue to focus on cookie alternatives and selling on a first-party basis.” Future’s stock was down less than 0.1%.
Jon Mew, chief executive of digital advertising industry body IAB UK, said “many” of the organisation’s members had “more questions than clarity this morning”.
But he said that despite Google’s announcement, “it isn’t and shouldn’t be a return to cookies as the default”.
“Our industry has made huge progress over the past four years and this process has irrevocably reshaped the digital ecosystem,” Mew said. “That doesn’t just evaporate with the removal of Google’s cookie deadline.
“The reality is that a big proportion of the open web can’t be addressed by third-party cookies already so continuing to pursue other ways of targeting and measuring audiences is vital. It’s also important to note that the ICO has responded by encouraging the industry ‘to move to more private alternatives to third-party cookies – and not to resort to more opaque forms of tracking’…
“Ultimately, our hope is that the removal of Google’s deadline restores a level of certainty and control to the wider industry that is conducive to further productive collaboration and development in this area.”
The head of IAB Tech Lab, a nonprofit digital media consortium that is independent to IAB UK, Anthony Katsur, similarly predicted that “the industry will likely end up in the same place.” We’re merely going to get there by an other, possibly longer path.
He added “It is important to await the exact implementation details of Chrome’s elevated ‘user choice’ approach to third-party cookies, which may put the industry in the same place.
“The advertising ecosystem still requires multiple solutions to safely and effectively target consumers, including alternative IDs, server-side solutions, Privacy Sandbox, and cookies. This isn’t materially different from what is happening today, as approximately 25% of the browser market is already cookieless, which requires solutions.” In contrast to their previous strategy, which was developed until recently with no industry input, Chrome now has more time to engage with the advertising ecosystem to produce a better Privacy Sandbox that works for everyone, thanks to Google’s disclosure about cookies, according to Katsur. “The IAB Tech Lab believes the industry should continue working towards a vision of a privacy-centric world without third-party cookies.”
Reach’s group director of digital and innovation, Terry Hornsby, addressed publishers, saying, “Some in the business will not be surprised by this decision. For Reach, though, this is just another illustration of the dynamic environment in which we work.“Our customer value strategy has always been about securing our own relationship with our customers and strengthening our advertising proposition, to make us less vulnerable to these kinds of shifts. With our large pool of first-party data as well as our own in-house advertising technology platform Mantis, we are well positioned and our focus will continue to be on strengthening our own relationships and capabilities.”
The Independent, which also makes a sizable profit from display advertising, has a chief data and marketing officer named Jo Holdaway. She stated: “Our work has not been wasted because almost half of our readers are already unaddressable in the traditional sense because they use non-Chrome browsers.“Of course the decision is frustrating considering the huge amount of time and effort put in by both publishers and the ad tech community into finding robust solutions to the deprecation of third party cookies by Chrome.”
“However we are committed to continuing to test new solutions, which include data collaboration, contextual targeting, universal IDs, curated marketplaces and the use of first party data for programmatic direct deals.”
Damon Reeve, the chief executive of publisher-owned advertising network Ozone, said that although “the full impact of these changes on audience addressability in Chrome remains uncertain, it’s clear that they will influence media buying strategies”.
Reeve said the company, which uses signed-in user information from its publisher members, was “confident in our ability to deliver greater addressability across the Premium Web, irrespective of third-party cookie deprecation”.
Google gives consumers a choice — but does that mean they’ll agree to cookies?
Some insiders in the business contended that allowing consumers to choose whether to accept cookies would accomplish the same goal as outright banning them.
Google has “finally acknowledged what the advertising industry has been saying for years—Privacy Sandbox is not a good product and does not sufficiently protect consumers’ privacy or empower advertisers,” according to Jeff Green, CEO and founder of The Trade Desk, a programmatic marketing technology company. Furthermore, publisher monetisation is most likely to suffer.
“Google seems to finally acknowledge that the best option for them is to give consumers the choice.
“The question that remains is—will Google truly give consumers’ choice? Or will they make the decision for consumers and then bury consumers’ access to change it?
“Apple has already taken this path—one that empowers Apple and deprecates users’ experience while asserting that the user can change it if they really want to and have the will to click a lot to find the buttons.”
Jacob Donnelly, who runs the subscription publisher A Media Operator, asked in his newsletter: “Google intends on giving users the choice of opting out of cookies. And when given the choice, will they choose anything but opting out?”
adding “we simply do not know what Google’s implementation will look like,” Donnelly predicted “vendors will play around with various techs. They’ll then make a bunch of lofty promises. Those promises will not be true. Publishers will get burned”.
While Google will no longer be officially ‘deprecating’ third-party cookies, we expect the industry impact to be more or less the same, with anticipated high consumer opt-out rates.
Following the cookie news, Joe Root, CEO of audience platform Permutive, issued a cautionary note about a “false sense of security.”
In a statement to Press Gazette, he said: “When third-party cookie opt-out is made simple, people overwhelmingly say no, evidenced by the impact of GDPR in Europe, where over 90% of people have opted out. Forty per cent of people who use Chrome have already said no, and that is when disabling cookies is hard, let alone easy.”
In a different statement, he said: “Google is using consumer choice as the cloak, killing the third-party cookie without necessarily having to provide an alternative solution, similar to Apple and ATT.
“The vast majority of users online are already unreachable due to signal loss in the open web today, causing publishers’ OMP yields to collapse. For advertisers, this signal loss means bidding on an ever-smaller group of users, pushing up CPMs and reducing the perceived efficiency of open web buying.”
Permutive “sits across more than a billion devices every month,” according to a post by Root on Linkedin. Of them, 40% of users have manually disabled cookies in Chrome, and 70% of users no longer have any cookies.
The “central change,” according to Adform’s chief technical officer Jochen Schlosser, is that the action “gets Google out of the gridlock of the CMA.”
“Google’s ability to control the fate of cookies through other mechanisms still leaves all power in its hands, and so this move does not change the control dynamics. Likely without any type of regulatory approval, this development also underscores the ongoing tension between new regulations in the fields of privacy and competition law against the influence that ‘very large platforms’ have on many dimensions of the Internet.”
Contextual advertising technology based in the United Kingdom Publishers like The Guardian and brands like Microsoft and Disney are among the clients of Illuma.
Chief strategy officer Ryan McBride said: “The events of the last five years, leading up to Google’s announcement this week, have made it clear that the industry should not be relying on third-party cookie infrastructure.
“While Google will no longer be officially ‘deprecating’ third-party cookies, we expect the industry impact to be more or less the same, with anticipated high consumer opt-out rates. This means the addressability challenges we’ve all been planning for, remain unchanged.
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