Google: No More Personalized Ads, Predicts 62% Revenue loss

Google Chrome to block 3rd party cookies within 2 years

[thedonald123]

Google Chrome announced this week they will slowly kill third party cookies.
If you haven't heard about this yet here's a good place to start with analysis of which Publishers win and lose: [adexchanger.com...]

we plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome. Our intention is to do this within two years.
[webmasterworld.com...]

This means no more Personalized ads. No more targeted ads that follow you around the Web. Those ads use Third party cookies. Only ads allowed will be contextual. Reverting back to ~10 years ago.

Based on an analysis of a randomly selected fraction of traffic on each of the 500 largest Google Ad Manager publishers globally over the last three months, we evaluated how the presence of a cookie affected programmatic revenue. Traffic for which there was no cookie present yielded an average of 52 percent less revenue for the publisher than traffic for which there was a cookie present. Lower revenue for traffic without a cookie was consistent for publishers across verticals—and was especially notable for publishers in the news vertical
[blog.google...]

This is likely disastrous for the majority of Publishers! Check your Targeting report. I'm earning double CPM for Personalized ads over Contextual and 2/3 total Earnings is from Personalized ads. How about you?

[lammert]

The sky is not falling.

For my AdSense account, CTR for personalized ads is slightly lower than for contextual ads, but CPC is approximately double. Advertisers have better ROI on personalized ads which makes them spend more money per click on those.

But when personalized ads are switched off in the future, the advertisers' budgets won't change and the publisher pool won't change. What will happen is that advertisers will increase their CPC to be able to spend their budget on the gross number of ad impressions available on publishers' sites, resulting in the same heap of money to be divided over the same pool of publishers. There may be a shift of money towards sites with content which easier matches higher-paying contextual ads, but IMHO that is about it.

<sidenote> Affiliate marketing is a different story because the blocking of third party cookies will effectively delete the link between the publisher sending the lead and the website completing the sale. </sidenote>

[tangor]

This is a kind of reverse marketing kind of thing. Promising you will lose money (and then in reality discover you're still making what you used to make under their personalized cookie thing)

So they can say: "See, it wasn't as bad as we thought it might be! Please continue to play with us!"

Or ... "You've already lost a bunch, what's a few pennies more?"

HOWEVER, with GDPR and upcoming regulation from USA, g just may be cutting their loses as quickly as possible to avoid any more fines and serious investigations into how they do business.

[IanTurner]

Even without third party cookies IP targeting will still provide a level of personalisation.

[JorgeV]

Hello-

Reverting back to ~10 years ago.

I wish I could earn as much as 10 years ago :)

[ember]

I say good riddance to personalized ads. I did better before they showed up since my sites are in high-cpc niches with plenty of advertisers. These days the personalized RPM is less than the contextual RPM, so I'll be just as happy if we all go back to ads that match site content.

[Broaster]

They wont get rid of it, They still keep showing personalized ads on my blog, ads that dont even fit my niche so most people wont click them. Its best to just go back on contextual ads that do with keywords on the niche, so if you have a blog that covers movies have movie or entertainment ads, if you have video game blog show video game ads, not some random crap that a user searched through the day before going to your site, like seeing an ad for prescription drugs on a video game site, or an ad for make up on a video game site.

ten years ago it was better for my niche blog, I was getting more CTR and ad revenue because the ads were relevant to my website not posting ads on some users or visitors post history on the web. I was getting ads relevant to my website and earning more money, now Ill get ads that have underwear or some cat food, because they are personalized on what the user searched, so having underwear or cat food ads on a Car website is not going to make sense,
Now if you get car or auto ads on an auto blog it makes people more likely to click and Should increase revenue.

[topr8]

>>This is likely disastrous for the majority of Publishers!

I Disagree ... my 'glory days' of adsense were before this personalisation came in ... i had a few good quality informational sites about a couple of niches that i knew a lot about - when the ads were contextual i did very well! as soon as they were no longer contextual i did badly .... partly because i didn't have high traffic but what i did have was visitors who were actually interested in the topic and thus clicked ads selling more information or products related to the subjects.

[Mark_A]

Doesn't remarketing rely on cookies? Will this be the end of remarketing?

[NickMNS]

>>This is likely disastrous for the majority of Publishers!

I think the impact will be a lot more nuanced. With the supply side of personalized ads eliminated, many advertisers will be forced to to resort contextual ads, thus increase demand and price significantly. As mentioned by others above, this works in the favor of publishers that are in specific niches for which there exists a high demand for that target audience. Websites that are more general in nature that cater to a broader and largely undefined audience will likely feel a lot of pain. But I guess that the biggest impact will be felt by the advertisers, as their costs will certainly go up but the effectiveness of the ads will likely fall. Many of these publishers will leave the market in search of other media.This in turn will hurt the online market as whole.

One question, what will the impact be on Facebook? As FB keeps their users firmly walled with the FB eco system, will cookies set by FB qualify as 3rd party? Will they be able to continue to predatoraly micro target their users?