yahoo finance Massive changes coming to Google Chrome threaten to reshape the modern internet

[iamjanco]

Quote

Many people are hyper-aware that the internet they experience is based on what various providers think they want to see. For marketers and businesses, that ability to infer what a user might want generates value. As targeting gets more precise, advertising can become more relevant to the audience.

 

Without the third-party cookie, however, businesses have less of an idea of who their audience is. That can degrade their ability to make money from advertising, making it harder to publish content for free without forcing users to hand over their emails or phone numbers.

 

Chrome, which commands 60% of global internet traffic, is the last major browser to allow third-party cookies. For years Apple's (AAPL) Safari and Mozilla's Firefox have blocked third-party cookies by default. But their share of the market is dwarfed by Google's. And while additional ad dollars flowed to Chrome after Safari and Mozilla enabled greater privacy protections, there will not be another browser for the ad market to fall back on once Chrome says farewell to the cookie.

The push to get rid of third party cookies follows shifting sentiment on the need for more robust consumer privacy. 

As a result, websites that rely on advertising on the open internet may struggle to exist. And users may be confronted with even more ads that they are less interested in as sites try to make up for the loss in value by churning out more ad volume.

 

Karsten Weide, the chief analyst at W Media Research, said some publishers could suffer revenue losses of 20% to 40% as the deprecation of third-party cookies diminishes the effectiveness of ads. "In a general sense, all sorts of websites will shut down or will be diminished in what they can provide," he said. "Ironically, although this is designed to protect users, at the end of the day this will be worse for users."

 

The end of third-party cookies could also in some ways worsen consumer privacy, experts contend, by further normalizing granular data collection. As more businesses steer people to log in to replace the data gathering that the cookie enabled, user profiles will become more detailed and centralized, essentially trading one paradigm of monitoring for another.

 

Source.

 

Note: I've been using the paid versions of Malwarebytes and Bitdefender, as well as Adblock Plus, to block first and third party cookies in sites I attempt to access, regardless of which browser I'm using. If a site offers me little in the way of what I'm after and requires me to provide additional info about myself (e.g, by way of mandating the need to establish an account for access; paid or not), I simply close that browser tab/window and go elsewhere.  Where access to my data is absolutely necessary for me to conduct my business (and/or to fulfill a desire to view specific content), I grant access to that data on a case by case basis.

 

Added:

 

Still...

 

...a lot of that will soon start being moot though as Google begins deprecating Manifest V2 web browser extensions in favor of Manifest V3 extensions. Browser extensions like those I already mentioned and others like uBlock Origin might stop working in Chrome as early as June this year. For more information, see Google Chrome's  Manifest V2 support timeline.

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

Edited March 26 by iamjanco
added info.

[Kaz]

Google kept this open while they developed market share.  Now they will use that market share to stifle competition.  They no longer need 3rd party cookies to collect their data.  The manifest v3 change is a lot more than just 3rd party cookies

[iamjanco]

1 hour ago, Kaz said:

Google kept this open while they developed market share.  Now they will use that market share to stifle competition.  They no longer need 3rd party cookies to collect their data.  The manifest v3 change is a lot more than just 3rd party cookies

 

Yup, and it might be interesting percentage-wise to know just how many web site owners--whether developers or not--are aware of the potential impact to their SERP because of that; as well as how many of those are actually trying to do something about it. I'm retired now and don't have to worry about it, but all sites that market what they're vested in--especially smaller sites like this one (EHW)--will have to deal with those possibilities (or not, but we both probably understand the implications associated with that).

 

Additional info for the laypeople ( source: )

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 3 by iamjanco

[Barefooter]

So best to stick with the Brave browser!  I ditched Chrome long ago.

[J7SC_Orion]

AI has rung in another round between Microsoft and Alphabet / Google, with the former now taking a (temporary?) lead, and the latter responding to the impact on advertising revenues - one could write a book on both corporations' ugly behavior towards '''private''' data...

 

IMO, at the end of the day, it is about maximizing the individual account's value as a potential purchaser and credit entity, a.k.a. information monetarization, for both corps, with us being the casualties in a world where politics is just a matter of $s spent...somewhat oddly enough, 1984 with John Hurt was on last night.

 

 

Edited April 4 by J7SC_Orion