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We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

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Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#171

Post by yencabulator »

Root_Denied wrote: post #53
justinclift wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's incredibly hard to tell. Heh, that's very much like the old "... and nothing of value was lost" then.

Yeah, the fact that they don't have a clear indication of impact means one of two things: - Cookies weren't doing a whole lot for them to begin with, and removing their use had negligible impact. - The other work their marketing department did to try and compensate for discontinuation of cookie usage interfered with the test, making the results useless for evaluating the value of cookies. I'm leaning towards the seco…

My personal favorite possibility: Nobody is actually able to connect advertising spend to incoming revenue in any rigorous way.

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#172

Post by datadrivenangel »

varenc wrote: post #138

Anyone know more about these 'offline passbacks'? > for certain tracking technology like hashed offline passbacks

You refer potential customers and send us a list, we tell you what they bought and how much we owe you.

The hashed offline part probably refers to hashed email or other PII, so that we can exchange data without actually exchanging data.

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#173

Post by phailhaus »

coldpie wrote: post #91
phailhaus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And slowly make the internet increasingly inaccessible without opening up your wallet. Hooray!

Given what ads have done to give us the current state of the web, I'm willing to give it a shot.

Ads alongside content is worse than no content at all? How?

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#174

Post by hnbad »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #11
c0l0 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one number that should be of interest to anyone who's not a professional "growth marketer" is missing, though, don't you agree? I skimmed the whole article, read your posting, and even though I know some of these words, I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered.

> I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered It's incredibly hard to tell. For us the goal of eliminating Cookies was important given the stance we have on privacy so everything went from there. The folks working in marketing for sure were not happy with the directive as it makes their job much hard…

It sounds like you're still using tracking, just without cookies. I understand the push to eliminate cookies was motivated by Google announcing it would force the decision eventually but it sounds like you're still using alternative means of tracking and identifying users.

Laws like ePrivacy in the EU do indeed have specific provisions regarding cookies but e.g. the GDPR is much broader than that and would still apply. How truthful is it that eliminating cookies is motivated by a strong stance on privacy rather than just getting a head start in marketing instead of having to scramble when Google pulls the plug? It doesn't sound like you reduced the tracking and behavioral analysis beyond what was technically unavoidable?

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#175

Post by hnbad »

yencabulator wrote: post #171
Root_Denied wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the fact that they don't have a clear indication of impact means one of two things: - Cookies weren't doing a whole lot for them to begin with, and removing their use had negligible impact. - The other work their marketing department did to try and compensate for discontinuation of cookie usage interfered with the test, making the results useless for evaluating the value of cookies. I'm leaning towards the seco…

My personal favorite possibility: Nobody is actually able to connect advertising spend to incoming revenue in any rigorous way.

This seems to be very much the case for behavioral ads as far as I can tell. At some point Google et al convinced everyone that tracking the user's every move across the Internet made for better conversions than just providing ads that are relevant to the content they appear alongside and everyone just nodded along. Given that we now know that Meta (née Facebook) blatantly lied about the effectiveness of video content (which single-handedly killed various news sites who made hard pivots based on these claims) I'm not convinced behavioral ads really do perform that much better. The biggest value add of Google ads was that it provided some safeguards against abuse and a reasonable expectation of safety and moderation.

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#176

Post by cantSpellSober »

troupe wrote: post #85

> 42.7% of internet users worldwide use ad blockers. Given how many people I know that still type google into the google search bar, I find this number to be extraordinarily high.

I couldn't find a source for this figure. It links to https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users which is more specific

> 42.7% of internet users worldwide (16-64 years old) use ad blocking tools at least once a month

> 27% of American internet users block ads

...I still couldn't find the source for that. I believe it's a "Digital Trends Report" by Hootsuite but couldn't find it.

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#177

Post by hightrix »

zelon88 wrote: post #65
potatoproduct wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user you'll probably find you get more clickbait, more ads, more paywalls, less access to high quailty content, etc as publishers scramble to survive. (Because the value of their ad inventory drops.) And as marketing is less efficient, higher budgets are required to drive the same results. We can potentially expect to see these costs gradually passed on to the consumers and watch more businesses fail.

How many times do you actually click on, or buy things from the ads you are shown? You make it sound like we should all be grateful. Like ads are adding value to our lives. They don't. Outside of marketing, nobody cares about ads. We train our cognition to cancel out ads. We avoid them. The only people looking at ads and appreciating them are the ones, like yourself, who find them useful for things nobody asked for.…

> We train our cognition to cancel out ads. We avoid them.

Anecdotally, I've noticed that with Reddits latest addition of allowing users to highlight posts yellow with a "super upvote" that, without thinking about it, my eyes immediately ignore those posts.

We are absolutely trained to ignore ads.

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#178

Post by HumanOstrich »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #169
guiambros wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I filter out..." > "I avoid ads... companies that I don't trust" > "I feel more comfortable..." > "...my personal data... "" > "I don't have to sit through... " > "I get what I came for, then I leave " > "I hope some day more of us can look beyond immediate personal benefit." Look, I'm ok if you want to be individualistic and say " screw the creators, content producers, journalists, and everyone else I'm freeloadi…

You can try to frame it in whatever way you want, but that does not change the fact, that you have zero idea, whether or how much I support creators that I like. It would do you good to not just assume things on the basis of someone's browsing and ad blocking habits.

That's reasonable. So, out of all the content you consume, for what percentage of it do you contribute to the content's author/creator/company? How much value per year?

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#179

Post by stubish »

madeofpalk wrote: post #24
block_dagger wrote: post #16

This article is too long and packed with marketing crap to wade through.

You're surprised an article about marketing is full of marketing stuff?

I'm waiting for the article about online marketing no longer being possible. And everything (except the marketing department) becomes better because search directs you to what you want to find, rather than what the highest marketing budget wants you to find.

Re: We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

#180

Post by jefftk »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #142
jefftk wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Also, I did figure out how to reproduce the Vimeo player cookie. If I visit https://docs.sentry.io/product/performance/performance-video... I get a __cf_bm cookie from player.vimeo.com.

Thanks. Going to look into that one.

I looked a bit more: it's documented at https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/12426260232977-Play... as an 'essential cookie' "which is part of Cloudflare's Bot Management service and helps mitigate risk associated with spam and bot traffic."

I think this is a grey area: I can't find any explicit official guidance on whether using cookies to detect bots fits within the e-Privacy exemptions. (I had thought it didn't but that's not worth much!)

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