The elimination of third-party cookies is nigh, and developments are ramping up – just a few days into the New Year and Google has already launched a new “Tracking Protection” option that allows Chrome users to restrict the data they share. But it’s all moot: Charles Benaiah explains that there’s not much left of an argument for why the Internet needs cookies anyway…
For most of our digital lives, the crumbs cookies left have been essential to the inner workings of the Internet. First, I went to ShortbreadsForSanta.com. Next, I went to IngredientsForBaking.com. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the pattern to my digital travels. And Google — well — they’re genius. Every time you went to a site, the site dropped a cookie into your browser. When you got to the next site, Google’s ad machine would fire up. It would look at your browsing history and auction off ad space someone who is clearly a cookie lover to the highest bidder. That’s why you see, an ad for CuttingCookieShapes.com.
The small sites we land on routinely don’t have sophisticated advertising capabilities. Vaguely, they know that somebody from my IP address came to their site. Limited data is not nearly enough to excite advertisers who lust for yahoo-level data.
On the other hand, Google has enormous amounts of their own first party data. That’s the data they gather as we use Google’s search, Gmail, YouTube, or any of its other properties. Google was also able to stitch together an even more powerful profile of each of us from the cookies in the browsers based on the role it plays between advertisers and the sites who desperately need the scraps of advertising that Google leaves for others. I’m beginning to think they left those crumbs for others as a ploy to get antitrust folks off their backs.
For the past few years, Google has been talking about getting rid of cookies. They haven’t because it hasn’t suited them to do that. So, they kick the cookie can down the road. That road is about to reach into a dead end. Starting now Google is going to jettison cookies for 30 million people. That sounds like a big number. And, it is. It barely scratches the surface of the digital universe.
Google’s head of private advertising technology (let that title sink in), Victor Wong says Google has taken the time to make sure that a fat-free Internet world won’t harm publishers that rely on cookies to get remnant Hydrox ads.
To a great extent, that’s true. Cookie data added to Google’s ad stack allowed publishers to focus on the business of publishing and not worry about having a sales force. But the business of advertising on small-ish sites isn’t a significant business to Google anymore.
The quality of ads to these secondary sites is as meager as the traffic that go there. Low-quality ads for largely forgettable products doesn’t excite Google the way used to. Analysis from outlets like Adalytics keep poking holes in the fabric of Google’s non-endemic ad business.
My go-to person for smart marketing insights — Danny Wiseman — drove the next nail in the coffin last week when he said, “You have to be a true psycho to recommend open web programmatic advertising to your clients in 2024.” Advertisers don’t want to run to the wild west and the best ad stack doesn’t need it, there’s not much left of an argument for why the Internet needs cookies. That doesn’t mean the Internet won’t track you. Far from it. What it really says is that ads without loads of actionable first-party data are mostly useless.
Since Tim Berners-Lee unleashed the forces of HTTP, the digital universe has been in the state of constant expansion. That ends here. What this really tells people is that ads are useless without a lot of first party data.
The attentions of a few mega-players will be filled with virtual realities inspired by AI trained on Politico stories fueled by wind farms. The rest of us will hang coal-filled stockings by our Dickensian chimneys while visions of Santa cookies from Christmas past dance in our heads.
Charles Benaiah is the CEO of Watzan, a techy company for medical media. When he’s not running a media company, he reads about media, thinks about it, pull out what’s left of his hair dealing with it, and, then, he writes about it over on unCharles. Charles is a member of Media Makers Meet – Mx3 Collectif.
