(This is the first of a three-part series on the changing internet media landscape.)
We used to call it New Media, the alternative to traditional media, which is to say print and television. We also said e-commerce - in that same vaguely self-conscious tone that I now use for things like “AI” and “content creator.”
Online news, online entertainment, online commerce, and the online incarnations of the conjoined oldest professions (advertising and the other one) were the future.
Fast forward (heh) to today, where paywalled versions of the truth compete with the social media versions; where the biggest threat to the-site-that-killed-TV is a Chinese mobile app; where we have to clarify when we read a “physical” book or shop in a “brick and mortar” store.
Turns out we were right about the future thing.
If advertising funds the business, then the business needs to cater to the advertisers. And the rules are about to change.
The new, advertising-fed and attention-starved media species of the post-Y2K Cambrian explosion are facing their own upheaval — precipitated, in a way, by their own offspring: browser cookies, generative AI, and cryptocurrency.
Today’s article is about browser cookies.
Google, using the de-facto authority of its market-dominating web browser Chrome, is effectively killing third-party cookies this year. (A third-party cookie is a little file that’s put on your computer when you visit a website, but it’s not from the website you visited, it’s from someone else.) By “effectively killing,” I mean Chrome is going to stop accepting them on behalf of the 60+ percent of us that use it to browse the web.
Third-party cookies are a concern for privacy advocates, because they are a way to aggregate information about our behaviors online. And who really wants to do that? Advertisers.
Advertisers want to know if you’re in the market for a car or a rug or a pair of earrings, and they pay a premium to target you with their ads. And advertisers fund websites, whether Facebook or the local paper - so now we have a ballgame. Because if advertising funds the business, then the business needs to cater to the advertisers. And the rules are about to change.
What happens to online advertising in a post-third-party era? I’m not sure. But here are some probables.
Lacking third-party cookie data, the value of first-party data (what the site you visit can gather about you) will increase. This has concerning implications, since it means that websites will be incentivized to gather as much information about you as possible, and share/sell it to aggregators, which probably leads to a different-but-the-same targeted advertising technology but with less transparency and governance even than we have now. (Pessimism? Yeah.)
A return to contextual advertising, meaning ads based on the site versus the visitor. This is old-school advertising. Contextual advertising seems benign on the surface, but there is a great deal of research on the problematic social effects of contextual advertising. Also, at least for now, contextual advertising doesn’t pay well.
A change for the satellite industries. It’s not only advertising that relies on third-party cookies. Site owners use technologies like Google Analytics to understand how visitors use their sites. Commerce sites depend on third-party cookies for passive personalization. Federated identity (single-sign-on) solutions often rely on third-party cookies to make things appear seamless. Online advertising, paid content, market research, and digital marketing (SEO) depend in varying degrees on this technology, and have for many years.
New tracking technology. It’s unrealistic to imagine we will return to an anonymized utopia, if there ever was one. Something will come up.
More paywalls. In the simplest terms, if you can’t stay afloat with advertising you supplement with subscription. Only a handful of media sites have succeeded with this model, but it may be that more sites are forced to try.
This isn’t meant to be doom-and-gloom. I work with experts in these fields every day, and there isn’t a single Chicken Little in the bunch. But that’s not to say that complacency will win the day - it’s no exaggeration that this small technology is a foundation-stone for products, businesses, and even careers.
Fortune favors the bold, and he who hesitates - well, you know.