On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi, professors at Boston University who have co-authored a paper titled "Can privacy technologies replace cookies? Ad revenue in a field experiment." The paper quantifies the impact of Google's Privacy Sandbox on publisher revenue, user experience, and market competition through a field experiment conducted in collaboration with Raptive, a digital advertising management platform.

Our conversation highlights the specific challenges faced by the digital advertising ecosystem as it moves away from traditional identifiers and toward a new, more restrictive privacy regime. Among other things, we discuss:

How the loss of third-party cookies specifically affects regional markets with stricter privacy regulations like the European Union
If the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies like the Privacy Sandbox could truly bridge the revenue gap created by the deprecation of cookies
What role browser vendors should play in establishing technical guarantees that satisfy both regulators and advertising stakeholders
Why the industry tends to respond to identity restrictions by developing more complex identifiers instead of contextual alternatives
When the concentration of traffic toward larger platforms will reach a tipping point for small-scale content creators
How the removal of personalization features on platforms like YouTube serves as a blueprint for future privacy-driven market shifts

We also cover another paper by Garrett Johnson, "COPPAcalypse? The Youtube Settlement's Impact on Kids Content."

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Season 7, Episode 22: Quantifying the advertising value of cookies (with Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi)

Mobile Dev Memo Podcast

Season 7, Episode 22: Quantifying the advertising value of cookies (with Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi)