“It’s a smaller percentage of what we do than what we anticipated” five years ago, said CEO Matt Prohaska.
Publisher network Raptive has redistributed resources away from testing Privacy Sandbox, Google’s suite of cookieless solutions, as the industry awaits more information about what Google’s new plan for cookies will be, said chief strategy officer Paul Bannister.
In the second quarter of this year, 20% of the investments Raptive made in cookieless solutions went on developing tech for and testing Privacy Sandbox. Today, that’s decreased to just 5%, Bannister said. Around 12 to 15 Raptive employees had been working on Privacy Sandbox for at least some of their workdays, equivalent to about four to five people working on the tech full-time. Now, just one person spends about half of their time on Privacy Sandbox, he added.
Google has not clarified exactly what it meant in its July blog post when it wrote, “Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice.” But last month, Google Privacy Sandbox did announce several updates that addressed industry critiques.
The status quo remains
While adtech firms may have not seen the new business they expected from a fast-approaching cookie deprecation deadline, deals were never going gangbusters.
“Even before the announcement, buy-side engagement was lacking,” said Andrew Casale, CEO of Index Exchange. “That has not improved since the change.”
Index Exchange invests around 3% of its overall revenue, equal to millions of dollars, in implementing the Privacy Sandbox solutions and has not decreased this investment following Google’s July announcement, an Index spokesperson confirmed to ADWEEK, (Reuters first reported this figure).
Even though third-party cookies remain, many users browse the web on their phones or on browsers that have long-deprecated cookies, like Safari. Several sources say that half of the web is already not addressable to advertisers via cookies.
Investing in solutions to commercialize this cookieless audience can pay off. Index Exchange said that using LiveRamp’s identity solution RampID on cookieless browsers leads to an estimated 144% increase in cost per thousand (CPM) impressions, compared to supply with no ID present.
“We know today that for users that we have opted into first-party data, those users we make a lot more money on,” Raptive’s Bannister said.