Next year, Google Chrome will abandon third-party cookies. Under the influence of this upcoming change, Chrome browser competitors, ad technology companies and open web advocates are racing to develop alternative systems.
Google will fundamentally change the way the entire Internet works. At present, a large part of the entire digital economy is based on third-party cookies, but Google Chrome will abandon third-party cookies sometime in 2022.
Many companies are experimenting with email-based tracking systems to directly collect more user data and re-enable unpopular forms of contextual advertising. The Microsoft Edge browser is built on Google’s Chromium kernel, and the company is another major challenger. When Google tried to put the Chrome browser at the heart of the advertising system, Microsoft was improving the anonymity of the existing advertising sales system.
Google’s plan to abandon third-party cookies in the Chrome browser is a big deal. Although Apple’s Safari browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser have restricted this tracking method many years ago, they are not as influential as Chrome. This change in the Chrome browser will not only impact the advertising industry but also affect those media that display relevant advertisements so that users can read articles for free.
Currently, third-party cookies in the Chrome browser track the user’s browsing history and send this data to advertisers. Third-party cookies mark specific users with different strings, allowing websites to display advertisements in a targeted manner. This marketing theory believes that if users see an advertisement for something they are interested in, they are more likely to click and buy.
However, users do not like their browsing history being tracked, and the public generally believes that it is necessary to change the status quo. Google’s alternative form in the Chrome browser is the “Privacy Sandbox”, which aims to replace cookies without subverting the status quo of the online advertising industry.
The most important of these is Google’s new ad tracking technology group joint learning (FLoC). This machine learning system can analyze the network activities on the Chrome browser, and aggregate users with similar interests together, and then push different advertisements to the corresponding groups. The difference is that these groups are not entirely based on the behavior of specific individuals.
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Google’s new system puts the Chrome browser at the center of the advertising process, which means that the current advertising business operations will be fundamentally changed. Microsoft’s countermeasure is Parakeet, this method uses the browser to anonymize user information, and then use the existing advertising system to bid and sell.
“We are still in its infancy,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. The company is working with industry and standards bodies on its approach. Google is also developing a “privacy sandbox,” and both companies said they will work with the advertising industry to develop more privacy-conscious cookie alternatives.
No matter who wins, advertising based on user behavior will not disappear. The first-party data collected by the website visited by the user is also regarded as a way to use personalized advertising.
The user’s email address determines which advertisements they see online. Although Google stated that its system does not use “alternative identifiers to track individuals,” the advertising industry is studying other ways to imitate third-party cookies.
Unlike third-party cookies, users must register in the system and allow targeted advertisements. This is the case with Unified ID 2.0, an open-source system developed by the technology and software company Trade Desk, which creates an identifier for each user who logs in with an email address. Users can set interest categories to determine the types of advertisements they see on the corresponding website.
“Use this ID together with the accompanying information, and then you can place targeted advertising.” Trade Desk senior vice president Philippa Snare (Philippa Snare) said. She added that this system allows users to control which advertisements they see, without the need to “let one or two companies control it.” So far, BuzzFeed, Foursquare and Comscore have participated in this project, and more than 50 million people have participated in testing this advertising technology.
But it turns out that e-mail-based advertising systems are also controversial because they are still associated with users’ personal information. Google said that such a system cannot “meet the growing expectations of consumers for privacy”, nor can it satisfy regulatory scrutiny.
Old advertising technology is also recovering. Artificial intelligence and machine learning make contextual advertising based on page content more complicated. Ingmar Zach, senior vice president of Criteo, a personalized advertising company, said: “We are already testing context-based targeted advertising, and the results are very encouraging.” Zach said that in-depth analysis of web pages can make advertising The quotient understands the topic of the article, whether the product is mentioned, and the user’s emotional reaction. Criteo is comparing this data with historical data collected by third-party cookie usage to make advertising more effective.
Competitors of the Chrome browser are also developing more powerful contextual advertising systems. Yandex browser is using deep learning to improve the understanding of the page. A spokesperson for the company said: “Contextual targeting depends on on-site content, not user characteristics.” He added that the company recently launched a tool to control third-party cookies and is studying more for its advertising network One-party data.
“The future is uncertain,” said Joanna O’Connell, vice president of market research firm Forrester. She expects advertisers to mix advertising tools. However, not every company can respond to these changes.
“Many aspects of the original ecosystem will face challenges,” O’Connor said. “They will not succeed, either because the operating model is unsustainable, or because there is no unique capital that can make them stand out in the new environment.”
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