As a web-publisher, I find the general distaste of (advertising) tracking cookies a little hard to swallow. At the end of the day, tracking cookies exist because they allow the sites you visit (and probably don't pay for directly) to earn more money (on average) across all their visitors.
Advertising is the life-blood of publishers on the Internet. Without advertising (and by extension, tracking) many of the sites you enjoy every day would cease to exist.
At least using cookies you CAN opt out (via browsing settings and plugins). All that will happen is that the tracking networks will switch to browser fingerprinting making tracking harder to control and more opaque.
> At least using cookies you CAN opt out (via browsing settings and plugins). All that will happen is that the tracking networks will switch to browser fingerprinting making tracking harder to control and more opaque.
It's been a little while since I talked to a specialized lawyer about this, but if I remember correctly, the same regulations would apply to this tracking strategy.
Your post is one unsubstantiated claim after another.
Just because you fund your content through ads, that doesn't mean someone else can't use a different model. Sorry to be brutal, but if you can't find a viable alternative model when ads aren't cutting it any longer, maybe your content simply isn't worth that much and losing your site isn't a great loss to anyone else.
Moreover, just because you associate ads with tracking, that doesn't mean everyone else does. The most lucrative advertising deals I know about are between sites catering to particular interest groups and advertisers who also cater to those groups and make a direct agreement with the site. It takes actual work to set this up, but can be very lucrative for all concerned, particularly without any middleman ad network taking a big cut of any money changing hands. Many models from classic sponsorship deals to modern product placement approaches are based on this idea.
> All that will happen is that the tracking networks will switch to browser fingerprinting making tracking harder to control and more opaque.
That's probably going to be illegal, too.
In any case, browser fingerprinting is becoming a hot topic for all the wrong reasons. I expect near-future browsers will basically kill it as a technique anyway.
I'm just looking through my browser history, and I can't see any site I've visited today that appears to be funded only by the kind of targeted ads we're discussing.
> In my experience, the most lucrative advertising campaigns are based on audience tracking and retargeting.
Perhaps you are fixating on certain types of campaign, then? Either that or you have very limited experience of different possibilities, but from your other comments, I doubt that is the case.
> and I can't see any site I've visited today that appears to be funded only by the kind of targeted ads we're discussing.
I think thats a key point. ALL banner advertising would be affected by this change. All ad servers use cross domain cookie tracking of some kind. If not to track user behaviour, its (for example) to track impressions to make sure that you dont show the same ad to the same user more than a set number of times. That is also a 3rd party cookie.
Without that ability it will be hard (impossible?) to rate limit campaigns to users, thus increasing the cost effectiveness to the advertiser and eventually hurting publishers as advertising money is diverted elsewhere.
In short, this rule would affect ALL banner adverts on all sites. So 99%, yes (at least the content sites I have read today).
> ALL banner advertising would be affected by this change.
No, it wouldn't. That's what several people in this discussion have been trying to explain.
Banners hosted locally and not by a third party service probably won't be affected at all.
Even banners hosted by a third party service won't be affected if they chose their content based only on the nature of the site where the banner would appear.
The only people who will lose out are the ad networks that track users as they move around different sites, and their business model and working practices are incompatible with my ethics (and, apparently, those of many other people, including those governing at EU level).
We should lose the conditionals, by the way. This has already been approved at EU level, and it will therefore become law throughout the EU in due course unless something dramatic happens. Given that the only people I've seen objecting even slightly seem to be those who are currently doing exactly the dubious things that these measures are intended to prohibit, "something dramatic" seems unlikely.
> Without that ability it will be hard (impossible?) to rate limit campaigns to users, thus increasing the cost effectiveness to the advertiser and eventually hurting publishers as advertising money is diverted elsewhere.
Why can't the advertisers simply re-evaluate the rates they pay per impression based on the expected cost/benefit under the new model?
Or just adopt one of the many pricing models that is based on actual results like CPC, instead of assuming that CPM is always going to be the right answer?
>Banners hosted locally and not by a third party service probably won't be affected at all.
So you have to install and manage your own local ad server to earn ad revenue from your site? Many publishers large and small use ad servers e.g. doubleclick, adtech to avoid this overhead.
>Why can't the advertisers simply re-evaluate the rates they pay per impression based on the expected cost/benefit under the new model?
> So you have to install and manage your own local ad server to earn ad revenue from your site?
No, you just have to use a system that doesn't try to track users everywhere they go.
> Many publishers large and small use ad servers e.g. doubleclick, adtech to avoid this overhead.
That's fine. Those ad servers are free to continue offering their facilities to webmasters who would like to use them rather than setting things up themselves. The only difference is that now the centralised services won't be allowed to track everyone everywhere.
> Yes, publishers loose out once again.
You keep saying things like that, but I don't think you've ever explained why you think this is inevitable. I and several other posters in this discussion have now presented you with numerous alternative ideas that still allow sites to carry advertising that is fairly well-targeted without violating the new rules that are going to apply after May. Those methods funded numerous sites for several years before the current generation of spyware-based ad networks took off, and given that hosting is far more competitively priced now, I don't see why today's enthusiast sites shouldn't be able to cover their costs if yesterday's could.
Advertising is the life-blood of publishers on the Internet. Without advertising (and by extension, tracking) many of the sites you enjoy every day would cease to exist.
At least using cookies you CAN opt out (via browsing settings and plugins). All that will happen is that the tracking networks will switch to browser fingerprinting making tracking harder to control and more opaque.