The text/cold wild goose

A more private way to Measure AD conversions are some of the topics that Chrome Developer Summit 2020 will discuss. How can advertising, one of the Internet’s most central business models, continue to play when third-party Cookie restrictions are on the rise and will soon be banned?

background

Yahoo! Is long gone, a “backward” company that manually indexed the Internet, and now everyone should not look at it. However, Wu Jun, the author of “Top of the Wave,” has a high opinion of Yahoo!

A hundred years from now, if only two people are remembered for making the most of the Internet, they are likely to be Jerry Yang and Davide Filo rather than Mr Page, Mr Brin or Mr Zuckerberg, the more famous Internet entrepreneurs of today.

Why is that? Because Yahoo set the rules of the Internet industry: open, free and profitable. Although the rule is now a bit broken, it hasn’t changed in general. The vast majority of Internet products are free to users and can be monetized through advertisements after obtaining enough traffic. In essence, Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Baidu, Meituan, Bytedance and Pinduoduo are all advertising companies selling different types of advertisements.

However, as countries for user data privacy protection more and more strict, Internet advertising this business model is currently facing a very big challenge.

Facebook took out full-page ads in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal to object to Apple’s changes to its privacy policy

Internet advertising is now more and more accurate, we see things in A site, how to run to the ADVERTISING inside the B site? One of the keys is third-party cookies. Advertising giants like Google can use third-party cookies to connect the dots between what we’re doing on many different sites. To understand this, take a look at cookie-based advertising.

What about cookie-based advertising

  • News. example is a high traffic news site that makes money from Internet advertising
  • Shoes. example is a shopping website that sells shoes and needs to advertise to get users
  • Adtech. Example is an advertising service provider. Shoes. example can advertise in news.example through adtech
  • When users click on news.example to watch news, they will load the ADtec. example advertising JS script (used to display ads, record AD browsing and click data), and click on the AD to jump to shoes.example site
  • When the user accesses shoes.example, the JS script of adtech. Example will also be loaded (for recording order data).
  • Adtech. Example’s JS script generates a unique user ID for each user, saves it in a cookie, and sends it to Adtech. Example’s server. Through the unique ID, the advertising browsing and clicking data of users in news.example and the placing data of users in shoes.example are combined and analyzed to calculate the advertising conversion rate

Adtech. Example, an advertising service, can calculate AD conversion rates because it generates a unique ID for each user and stores it in a cookie. For both news.example and shoes.example, the cookie of Adtech. Example is a third party cookie (abbreviated as 3P cookie in the picture, which is a bit strange).

Third-party cookies are still available in Chrome, as long as the SameSite property of the cookie is set to None and the Secure property is set.

However, Chrome plans to stop supporting third-party cookies in 2022, which means adtech. Example will no longer be able to track users through cookies. Other major browsers, such as Safari 13.1, have banned third-party cookies, and Firefox and Edge are doing similar things. So, disabling third-party cookies is a matter of time, much sooner than we think.

At that point, even if you set SameSite to None, it doesn’t work, so it’s None worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and a null pointer worth billions of dollars is much more expensive.

If Google says it will no longer support third-party cookies for two years, there must be another way to continue selling ads. After all, Google is one of the biggest advertisers on the Internet.

What about advertising without cookies

The protagonists of the story remain the same:

  • News. example is a high traffic news site that makes money from Internet advertising
  • Shoes. example is a shopping website that sells shoes and needs to advertise to get users
  • Adtech. Example is an advertising service provider. Shoes. example can advertise in news.example through adtech

The difference is that advertisers no longer use cookies to save the unique ID of users, so they can no longer use cookies to link the behavior of users clicking on ads in News. example with the behavior of users placing orders in Adtech. Example. Then how to calculate the advertising conversion rate?

At that point Chrome comes out and says, “Don’t think about taking all the data, I’ll decide what data to give you.” It’s the Event Conversion Measurement API.

  • When users watch news on news.example site, they will load the ADVERTISING JS script of Adtech. Example, so they can see the advertisement of shoes.example. Click the advertisement to jump to shoes.example site, and the user’s clicking behavior will be recorded in the browser and stored locally
  • When a user visits shoes.example, the user’s order is recorded in the browser
  • Based on the information configured when adtech. Example is connected to ads, the browser can link clicks on ads in news.example to user orders in AdTech. Example and report them to AD service providers, which can calculate conversion rates
  • There is some data obfuscation and a delay before the browser reports the data to the AD service, which further protects user privacy. If the data were reported in real time, the AD service would know exactly when a user placed an order and be able to collude with the advertiser to find out who the user was.

Because the cross-site association of user behavior is done by the browser, the amount of user data that an AD service can access is limited by the browser, and Chrome can decide which data to give, whether to give it perfectly accurate data, and when to give it. Chrome’s code is open source, and the Event Conversion Measurement API is an open standard, so there’s no need to worry that Chrome will deliberately create a back door for itself.

It seems that everything is perfect, users’ privacy is protected, and News. example, shoes.example and Adtech. Example all make money.

However, it’s still a bit frustrating for Adtech. Example, because it doesn’t have access to comprehensive user data, analyze AD conversion rates in real time, or correlate user behavior across sites. Protection of user privacy has certainly increased, but things are getting worse for advertisers on the Internet. It is reasonable and a trend that advertisers have gone a bit too far, collecting too much user data.

One more thing, the Event Conversion Measurement API is a little bit complicated, but I didn’t go into all the details. It would also be a headache if every browser had its own set of Event Conversion Measurement apis similar to Chrome’s, but not quite the same :()

thinking

Chrome’s technical solution to the problem of Internet advertising is interesting and worth paying attention to. But my biggest lament is not the question itself. To put it bluntly, this is just one small thing Chrome has done to change the Internet industry, as little as anything else.

As I wrote on my blog a year ago JavaScript In Simple Terms Lesson 5: How Chrome succeeds From its inception, Chrome was committed to pushing the Web forward:

We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

No one would have believed that in 2008, but that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that Google did it. Chrome really pushed the Web forward. Without Chrome, there would be no V8 engine, no Node.js, no NPM, no Babel, no ESLint, no VS Code, no Vue/React, and no thriving front-end ecosystem. Nor are there the rapid advances in web-related technical standards such as ECMAScript, HTTPS, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and WebAssemblys.

Utilitarian, without Chrome, Google, the Internet’s biggest advertiser, would have been very passive in solving the problem of third-party cookies being restricted. Facebook doesn’t have control over its browser or operating system, and it’s helpless against Apple, reduced to putting ads in newspapers to save itself. What’s the point?

Therefore, if the giants do not have a sense of crisis, do not delve into the underlying technology of computing, build their own technology ecosystem, when faced with the same challenge, they will probably have to send out newspaper ads.

reference

  • A more private way to measure ad conversions, the Event Conversion Measurement API
  • A more private way to measure ad conversions
  • Using HTTP cookies
  • What are Third Party Cookies, How do they work?
  • SameSite Cookie Attribute Explained by Example (Strict, Lax, None & No SameSite)
  • Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete
  • Lesson 5: How Chrome works