The future funding of journalism on the open internet remains in question despite news that Google will not kill off third-party cookies on its Chrome web browser after nearly five years of promising otherwise.
Matthew Scott Goldstein, a consultant who has written previously for Press Gazette on how publishers can avoid “extinction” amid the end of cookies, summed up the views of many when he said it is “unclear exactly what this means”.
“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.”
Third-party cookies underpin most publisher advertising revenue by enabling marketers to target readers with more relevant messages. Google has said it will “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing”. But whether this turns out to be better or worse for publishers than forcing them to use Google’s Privacy Sandbox cookie-killer technology remains to be seen.
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Industry ‘should continue’ transition to first-party data despite Chrome news
Few mass market, ad-funded news publishers contacted by Press Gazette on Tuesday were willing to offer a view on the cookies news.
The stock market was largely unmoved by the development. Shares in Reach, the largest publicly-listed news publisher in the UK and one which relies on display advertising for most of its digital revenue, were down 0.3% by market close on Tuesday.
Shares in Future, a magazine company that also draws substantial income from display advertising, were down less than 0.1%, and a spokesperson for the company said: “Details in the blog post remain light, and we continue to focus on cookie alternatives and selling on a first-party basis.”
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.”
[Read more: Independent set to hit four million online registrations after pivot to first-party data collection]
Anthony Katsur, the chief executive of nonprofit digital media consortium IAB Tech Lab (unrelated to IAB UK), similarly said that “the industry will likely end up in the same place. We’re just taking a different, potentially longer route to get there.
“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.”
But Google’s cookies announcement, Katsur said, gives “Chrome more time to work with the advertising ecosystem to develop a better Privacy Sandbox that works for everyone versus their initial approach, which, until recently, was developed with minimal industry input.
“The IAB Tech Lab believes the industry should continue working towards a vision of a privacy-centric world without third-party cookies.”
What have publishers said about Google’s cookie U-turn?
On the publisher side Terry Hornsby, the group digital and innovation director at Reach, said: “This announcement will come as no surprise to some in the industry… However, for Reach, this is simply another reminder that we operate in a changeable landscape.
“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.”
Jo Holdaway, the chief data and marketing officer at The Independent, which also draws substantial income from display advertising, said: “Circa half of our users are already unaddressable in the classic sense as they use non-Chrome browsers, so our work has not been wasted.
“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.”
A spokesperson for Mail Metro Media, which sells adds across DMG Media titles and The Telegraph, said: “Mail Metro Media strongly believes that the market should continue working on cookie-free research and developments despite Google’s announcement this week.
“Whilst there were legitimate industry-wide concerns regarding Privacy Sandbox, we welcomed the emerging initiative as it had the potential, if designed and implemented appropriately, to empower advertisers with a viable alternative. We will continue to collaborate closely with Google and other parties to ensure new and improved developments that drive best practices in the digital marketing landscape.
“As an industry, it is vital that we are all aligned to evolve, to enable targeting and measurement, and facilitate scaled advertising solutions across all browsers.”
And 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 first-party data signals 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?
Other industry insiders argued that giving users the ability to opt out of cookies would largely achieve the same end as simply doing away with them.
Jeff Green, chief executive and founder of programmatic marketing technology company The Trade Desk, said Google had “finally acknowledged what the advertising industry has been saying for years — Privacy Sandbox is not a good product and doesn’t sufficiently protect consumers’ privacy or empower advertisers. And it probably hurts publisher monetisation most.
“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.”
[Read more: Google’s new Sandbox advertising system could be ‘the end for a lot of publishers’]
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?”
Commenting “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”.
Publishers must continue to future-proof for life after cookies
And Joe Root, the chief executive of audience platform Permutive, warned of a “false sense of security” following the cookie news.
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 separate 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.”
On Linkedin, Root posted that Permutive “sits across more than a billion devices every month. Of those, 70% of consumers no longer have a cookie and within Chrome, 40% of consumers have manually disabled cookies”.
And Jochen Schlosser, chief technology officer at Adform, said the “central change” was that the move “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.”
UK-based contextual advertising technology Illuma works with publishers including The Guardian and advertisers including Microsoft and Disney.
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.
“Publishers should continue building future-proof frameworks and testing next-generation solutions which extend and enrich their first-party data, while third-party cookies are still available— benchmarking against them while they can.”
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