Dive summary:
- Both Firefox and Safari have blocked cookies from third-party companies on publishers' sites to help consumers' privacy; this has hurt smaller publishers who depend on third parties to sell ads, but larger publishers like Google and Facebook stand to benefit.
- Big publishers will be able to prop up their proprietary audience data to command a higher ad price tag; this is especially true of Google and Facebook who have a broad reach of consumer behavior that can simulate advertising across multiple third parties.
- Small publishers will be heavily affected as they rely on third-party cookies to meet the targeting demands of advertisers.
From the article:
"Without a third-party cookie, long-tail publishers may have little choice but to band together into federations like Glam Media's or WordPress’ blog networks, said Andrew Casale, vp of strategy at ad network Casale Media. Those entities could then drop network-wide first-party cookies and institute network-specific user IDs à la Facebook Connect to build audience profiles approaching the size and depth of media giants like Facebook, Google, Hearst and the Times."
