A world without cookies is still an advertising world

Third-party tracking using cookies is coming to an end. While the death of cookies has been delayed several times already, there is no doubt that cookies won’t play a role anymore in the future when it comes to advertising.

Google, being an advertising company, needs to get it right though, as most of the organization’s revenue depends on advertising. Good news for Google is that it owns Chrome, which more or less determines through an update when cookies are no longer usable.

Google and other advertising and marketing companies work on several systems to replace cookies.

A prominent example is Google’s attempt, or better attempts, to push its ideas into the market. Broken down, Google plans to move away from individual user tracking to group tracking. Chrome plays an important role here, as interest groups are determined by the web browser.

That is a step up from letting advertisers and ad-tech organizations define what interests a particular user has. It also means less data exposing.

The main downside to this is control. The organization that controls the browser controls advertising, which suits Google just fine but has other advertising companies up in arms.

Replacements for third-party cookies may also attempt to stay very close to individual user tracking, albeit with more privacy sprinkled on top to appease privacy-rights groups and users alike.

One of the dominant ideas here is to replace third-party cookies with encrypted email-based IDs. As Digiday points out in an August 2022 article, the main issue here is not security or privacy, but getting user consent.

Publishers would need to get their users onboard with the system, and most might not have the means to convince a large part of the userbase to do that.

Another approach moves the data gathering to the first party. While third-parties may no longer receive data about user visits directly, they may receive the information from the site’s the user visits.

All in all, it is not clear right now how this is going to pan out, only that there will still be some form of tracking and that advertisement won’t go away.

Photo Credit: Mincemeat/Shutterstock

'A world without cookies is still an advertising world' first appeared in Weekly Tech Insights, a free weekly newsletter that you can sign up to here.