I'm definitely in the minority of commenters on these FLoC threads. I hate that 3rd party cookies exist, and support FLoC if it would hasten the demise of 3rd party cookies. It seems like many consider the alternative to FLoC to be an anonymous web where content can be accessed without login. The migration of content into walled gardens like Instagram seems more likely to me.
Anonymous web makes sense. The very idea that we need an ad profile that follows us as we traverse the web is ridiculous.
Contextual advertising works. Visit a popular website covering PC hardware .. and advertisers can pay to put ads to parts, chips, cases, etc. Visit a website that covers hiking trails and companies can purchase ads for camping gear, travel lodging, etc.
The very notion that it should be normal for an ad profile to be built around everything I do on the web is frankly dystopian and depressing.
And even that's a second order thing. Even if Patreon (or hey, onlyfans) aren't the dominant model now, I'm fine with breaking nearly any invisible system of content payment in favor of visible ones just to see what happens.
At this point, I think it's become a "too big to fail" argument for the industry.
We have several near-trillion-dollar companies that basically have no viable business model other than doubling down on targeted advertising. If third-party cookies get demonized or GDPR'd to death, they need to pivot to SOMETHING else that still fits into the same profiling paradigm.
I suspect it's not about results or innovation anymore, it's about being a moat. Only a trillion-dollar company with huge scale and scope can possibly build and maintain "high quality" profiles, so it's a great way to spread FUD against any competing, potentially actually privacy-first, ad-tech upstarts.
I'm sort of waiting for the "Emperor has no clothes" moment. We see the occasional "Brand stops advertising for 6 months and sales stay on trend" story, or the "our best conversions come from real content and relevant direct ads" story. We have the fact that ad spend grows and yet publishers starve, implying the middlemen are taking an ever-larger chunk of value out of the ecosystem in exchange for their services. It's gonna be ugly when the dots are joined.
I understand your point. Though when email campaigns came out the goal was to send the email to everyone. Then it was to target people. I think that targeted emailing obsession then led to the natural conclusion of targeted adverts on the web through personalisation. I'm not sure the ROI on the adverts is what companies think it is. Just like it isn't for email campaigns.
I feel there may be a better market like roody15 has said for contextual analysis of websites and provide adverts based on that. Enhanced with Anon user traffic and buy paths. Which could slowly overtake if done well.
Then if you cross reference this with how procurement works, bullshit jobs and similar (can't find that article) starts to make some sense.
Though there may be arguments such as manipulation as to why the focus is on the advert personalisation and not the nefarious things that can come out of it. Think McCarthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Blacklists
Regardless of your persuasion consider if the other side gets in and you end up on the black list.
'I don't mind adverts tracking me' vs 'I can't get a job because of X opinion'
> if it would hasten the demise of 3rd party cookies
Will FLoC speed this up?
As far as I know, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are already largely publicly committed to phasing out 3rd party cookies over the next couple years. I guess FLoC might move that deadline up a bit?
But I suspect some critics of FLoC are looking at the proposal as a compromise that we don't need to make. The thinking is, at the point where we have public statements from every single major browser, including Chrome and Edge, that 3rd party cookies are going to get phased out, why do we need to throw the advertising industry a bone? We won this particular fight, 3rd party cookies are going out the door. Now (the thinking is) we just need to make sure that counter-proposals like FLoC and FPS[0] don't reverse the gains we've made.
I'm not completely sure how to characterize Google's recent proposals, but an arguably reasonable take that I've seen online is that Google somehow got peer-pressured into making a very public commitment to remove 3rd-party cookies, that they no longer feel they can back down from that commitment, and that a lot of their recent proposals seem to be attempts to find some way to get out of that deal. First Party Sets in particular are just a very conveniently timed proposal. I suspect this take is at least a little simplistic, but if it is at all accurate then now is a very good time to increase pressure on Google, not decrease it.
So I think we might be in a situation where the onus is on people proposing compromise to prove that compromises will make a difference, because I don't take it for granted at this point that FLoC's acceptance or rejection will change anything about how 3rd party cookies are handled in the future.
If you look back at Chrome's original announcement about phasing out third-party cookies, they are explicit about replacements like FLoC being how it happens:
"After initial dialogue with the web community, we are confident that with continued iteration and feedback, privacy-preserving and open-standard mechanisms like the Privacy Sandbox can sustain a healthy, ad-supported web in a way that will render third-party cookies obsolete. Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds, we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years." -- https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-...
(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
Running a content site with a premium ad network (Cafe), they seem pretty affirmative about RPMs dropping later this year once Chrome phases out third-party cookies. They aren't really saying this will only happen once an alternative solution is found.
It's really the other way around. Major browsers have decided to phase out 3rd party cookies (with some pressure from outside forces), so now advertisers are scrambling to find alternatives. Whether or not FLoC catches on is related to whether or not it's a good alternative -- there are others out there. It's not driving the demise of 3rd party cookies, but if 3rd party cookies become useless for targeted ads, then FLoC is one of the contenders to fill the space.
I could see ad agencies start to buy well-known https endpoints per client domain that makes 3rd party cookies into 1st party cookies. This whole problem isn't going way -- it is just going to shift.
Yup. Instead of adcookies.adco.com, it will become adcocookies.<populardomain>.com. Also there are lots of other ways to fingerprint a person. I'm 99.95% sure google wouldn't commit to supporting the end of 3rd party targeting cookies if they didn't have a plan for sustaining their ad revenue.
The idea that FLoC is a more privacy-friendly alternative to third-party cookies is deeply flawed, please read [this](https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/100).
Thanks. Good thread. Sounds like FloC is definitely more anonymous than third party cookies that are already in use today. There might are some hypothetical situations with FLoC where some information might be able to be inferred given sufficient data, but this is not trivial/direct like it is today.
I have my doubts about the "more anonymous" part, mainly because 3p cookies are constrained to a single browser on a single device and can be easily erased or blocked, but your browsing habits that will land you on a certain cohort will remain the same across devices so you could technically be tracked cross-device even if you don't sync your browsing history or cookies (if I am reading right the way FLoC works).
Quick edit: you are certainly right that it will be less direct and more effort than cookies.
Not to mention that this only really makes it more difficult for businesses who haven't already infected the web with things like social media buttons, widgets, or analytics scripts.
Neither Facebook nor Google require third party cookies to function, and I doubt FLoC would make any difference when they can already slurp up so much data that is voluntarily provided by other people without your consent (your address book, for example). Google even goes one step further by connecting your Google account directly to the browser, but there's also a reason why your Facebook login will never expire unless you force it to.
This whole thing feels like paying lip-service to privacy to keep people distracted from the reality that a cadre of 90s/00s tech giants have essentially usurped the web.
Most people on the internet use a web browser developed by a search engine company that evolved into a faceless advertising giant, after all.
Facebook ads and Google ads do not need third party cookies ?
How are they serving contextual ads if they don't know what you are doing on different websites if the myriad of trackers they offer to content websites do not track you by third party cookies ?
there are several ways. ETags for one, another is to have all the various sites that use an ad network to send the relevant visitor fingerprint data to a central broker that correlates the information and attempts to determine that entity A and entity B are really the same person because a bunch of attributes match.
You just might be right. If you clear the history, the FLoC machine will have to calculate the cohort ID afresh. There are other use cases for this as this form of identification can be manipulated. Don't want to see cat ads anymore, google more dog memes next week.
I think it's probably naive to assume that, if FLoC was implemented, advertisers would just stop using their existing tracking technologies, which allow for better tracking than FLoC offers. I imagine most would continue to use these, plus FLoC.
Third party cookies are already on the way out, allthough it is going very slowly. But if that is already happening, I see no reason to replace it with something that is going to stay and is only slightly better. Being patient is easier and better, it will be a question of a few years I suppose, instead of, I don't know, forever? :)
Content providers want third party cookies. Users have no idea what third party cookies are. Any deprecation of third party cookies will have to come from the user-agent (Safari and Chrome being the only ones that matter).
Yes even the advertisers don't care. It's the networks themselves that build value worth big data that keep the myth alive that tracking is necessary for advertising.
You: Here's a cute picture of my cat, I'll post it on Instagram for my friends
Instagram: cool! We're showing this to all your friends. BTW it costs us money to do this but don't worry, we don't charge you, we just show some ads to your friends.
You: Hey, my kitten is really popular, a lot of people are liking it.
Instagram: High five! You're popular. We ended up making a lot more money from selling ads than it cost us to show it! Thanks!
You: wait, that was my cat picture, where's my cut?
This always gets said, and I don't exactly think it's untrue, but it carries this strong implication that the problem is that people are too cheap to pay.
And I'm not sure that's entirely true.
My own pet theory is that - payment method and model issues aside - the largest contributor is the uncomfortable questions it makes us ask ourselves.
When you pay for something, you ask yourself if whatever you are buying is actually worth the price. And a lot (most?) of what people seem to do on the web these days is feed their dopamine as much novelty as they can, as quickly as possible.
I don't know how much value people are expecting to get out of their browsing activities. Do they even think it's actually worth the time, if they stop and think about it? Asking them to pay for it is forcing them to confront this issue.
The social media services like us to think the users (people with the pictures of kittens) don't add any value individually. The let us believe that it's the network effect, plus their infrastructure, that is the value, and because those wouldn't exist without the service, that is what generates revenue. But of course individual users add value. Without people sharing their kitten pictures, there'd be no network, no content, worth selling ads around.
For ad-supported social media, we're all just unpaid labor and we're told that labor has no value anyway.
Of course, by selling that position, they've also convinced the end user that the service is not worth paying for. But when there's nothing the end user wants to pay for, and ad revenue drying up, social media services will have to pivot to make money elsewhere.
The end result, not surprisingly, will result in a mixed model of subscription and ad revenue supporting content that the service has, in some way, paid for. Sound familiar? Of course, the end user will still not be paid for the labor contributed, but then the less the ad revenue depends on the user-generated "free" content, the closer the value of that labor tends to zero.
One of the contenders for replacing 3rd party cookies is The Trade Desk's Unified ID 2.0, which if I understand correctly, would require users to login in everywhere and be tracked in exchange for free content. But it's going to compete with other companies like Google and Facebook for managing users' online identities.
CPM price for targeted ads is lot more than untargeted ads. So likely the publishers will increase the number of ads per page to maintain the same eCPM yield. Also the ads will optimize for top of the funnel (clicks) than bottom (conversion). So we will start to see aggressive & intrusive ads. (remember the "punch the monkey" ads from the early 2000s?)
> CPM price for targeted ads is lot more than untargeted ads.
Only because they're viewed. If we can get everyone to install an ad blocker, that price will plummet, and business models that aren't based on abusing users will be allowed to succeed.
This means that the only way to make money is via subscriptions or cross promoting something that makes you the real money. The walled gardens, being able to both avoid Adblock and sell targeted ads, will do quite well.
If your goal is the open web of yore, that doesn’t exactly sound like a win.
How do you think web rings worked exactly? Before SEO, you'd land on some person with a niche interest's page who'd generally know of someone else in that niche space. Those two would link to one another, effectively syndicating each other.
It wasn't until everyone started fighting SEO-wise that you ran into the issue of fraud pages of nothing but links and sketchy ads that were the byproduct of reverse engineering Google's PageRank algorithm of the time. In fact, before SEO, there really wasn't that much of a niche for "Social Media" proper. A creator's web page and web ring were basically the social networks of the time, and arguably much less addictive or prone to scraping in the sense most back and forth was BBS/IRC/Email/Forum.
I remember the first time I overheard someone pitching SEO while eating lunch with the lunch pool from the office. If I were more the type to barge in at that time I'd have called them out as the fool they were being for corrupting a seachable index. Little was I expecting at the time that engineering indexes was the New Big Business and that the Web I knew was in the process of being obliterated and replaced with the shark infested botnet and data hoard-i-tron we have today.
Imagine a world without ubiquitous IP geolocation. One without rampant browser fingerprinting. Without everyone and their brother wanting you to subscribe for a recurring revenue stream. Without widespread collusion amongst industry actors to embed DRM circuitry or backdoors into every General Purpose piece of hardware under the sun.
It was a completely different world and tone to computing. It was your tool, and it was there to empower you; not to shovel crap through your bloody hardware whether you wanted it or not.
Examples of walled gardens that many people use are Instagram, FB, even Reddit to some extent which hamstring their mobile sites and push you to an app.
I couldn't get out of all these either but I keep them strictly separated in Firefox tab containers. I think it works because Facebook always suggests friends to me whom I don't know at all, and its ads have no relevance to me (only to the 1 or 2 topics I use FB for).
I'm still not convinced that's a bad thing. Does this not ensure profitable sites will be around because they provide enough value to their users to charge a fee, everything else will be stuff like passion projects.
I really just feel that 1. Advertising is manipulative and evil in its' modern form, and 2. Targeting further multiplies its' ability to do evil.
I'm not convinced that what we receive in exchange for empowering 1 and 2 is in any way worth it.
That is only true because targeted ads are possible.
In a world where there is no targeted ads, companies still need to get clients and compete. The marketing budgets of companies would not miraculously go down if targeted ads ceased to exist, the money would just go to other means, and non targeted ads are a very good candidate (also they can be extremely hard to block as they can be served first party if needed)
> The marketing budgets of companies would not miraculously go down if targeted ads ceased to exist
If marketing returns drop, all other things being equal, budgets being cut is the natural consequence, because less spending will be possible before declining marginal returns result in negative net returns to further spending.
Yes. TV advertising is actually much more targeted than web advertising. (In the sense than TV advertisers know precisely their target audience and its response.)
The various annoying remarketing schemes are a tiny part of advertising technology and really only exist because of the well-meaning but poorly thought-out ideas about privacy on the web.
Most of the internet ads are direct response. As long as companies get back more than they spend they keep spending. So there is no set "budget". If direct response goes away there is not enough brand budget to buy all the ad impressions so the prices go down a lot.
Is content-based targeting really so much less effective than user-based, or is this more of an arms race between ad providers where even a small difference gives them a large edge? Youtube doesn't need to know someone is a snowboarder in order to show them snowboarding-related ads. They can just show those ads on snowboarding videos and they don't need to invade the user's privacy to do that. The targeting is not as accurate, but it's how ads have basically always worked, how they worked on the internet before the ad networks and tracking, and how they still work in other media.
But does the money go to the publisher? I’ve read somewhere that most of it (like 90%) goes to the ad tech middlemen. If the ad does not track, there is no ad tech, so more money goes to the publisher.
> It seems like many consider the alternative to FLoC to be an anonymous web where content can be accessed without login.
How do you arrive at this conclusion? Authentication does not depend on third party cookies. Third party cookies are used to track visitors across multiple sites, independent of authentication to the first party site. I haven't seen suggestion elsewhere that third party cookies are about anything else.
Why do you prefer empowering Google even more to walled garden model?
Walled gardens are good, at least in that there are several of them. This means the Web as seen by the average consumer is still somewhat decentralized.
I'm minority as well, as I think that targeted ads are important for the Internet.
First of all, I think that ads in the Internet are important, it's a driving force. Without ads there will be no Internet with lots of "free" resources, everything valuable will be paywalled which is a problem for poor people and nuisance for the rest. That's already an issue for many information websites because of abundant adblock usage and those websites are paywalling their articles.
If ad is not targeted, you'll get terrible click rate for niche ads. So your advertisement budget will cost more and some businesses just won't work, as you won't be able to attract enough customers for reasonable budget. Another issue is that advertisement budgets are paid by customers and inefficient advertisement lead to higher costs of the end product.
It's basically like TV where ads cost a lot and small players just can't afford it. And that's because those ads can't be targeted.
Because of mentioned issues, I think that targeted ads are needed for the Internet, they're making world a better place in the end.
Google clearly tries to find a balance between privacy and ads targeting. And that's a good thing. May be FLOC is not perfect, although I'm not sure if it could be implemented in a significantly better way. But just disregarding targeted ads for me sounds like a wrong solution. What should be done is regulation of advertisement platforms which should be prohibited by law to track individual users and just use anonymized information, voluntarily provided by the user agent.
And those who don't like FLOC idea, probably will be able to use browser extensions to modify its behaviour.
>I'm minority as well, as I think that targeted ads are important for the Internet.
Citation required.
Not one Ad was required for the Internet to be useful. Hell, the WWW started as a bunch of hobbyists sharing info about what they liked. Google's killer product their search index. Not Ads.
I don't need to pay anyone for me to host something aside from the domain name, and a connection to an ISP. I just have to want to host it. The rest of the world at some point decided the Net MUST be monetized. Cookies came soon after, then JS, then all the familiar trappings of the web as a monetized medium.
Note; it becomes relevant for scaling or platforming to be able to be paid, but evven then, there are other ways to do that besides selling everyone else's privacy, comings and goings, etc.
Once you add money to something, you lose anonymity and safety from surveillance. No one would care one iota about what went on in Cyberspce if there wasn't a buck to be made.
I miss those days so horribly. Information shared and organized for it's own sake...
Well the internet was a lot more useful, and pleasurable, before targeted ads were a thing. So I’d quite like to know how you came to that conclusion as well
> First of all, I think that ads in the Internet are important, it's a driving force. Without ads there will be no Internet with lots of "free" resources, everything valuable will be paywalled which is a problem for poor people and nuisance for the rest.
Wikipedia might just be the most valuable information resource there is with the Stackexchange network also ranking highly. The former has no ads and the latter has a negligible number. High-quality traditional media are often already pay-walled.
