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Third-party cookies aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Google is changing course from its years-long plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome and is proposing to no longer get rid of the tech, Anthony Chavez, VP of Privacy Sandbox, announced in a blog post on Monday. While the company said it would propose an approach that “elevates user choice,” many details of that path forward remained undefined in the post.
“Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time,” Chavez wrote in the post. “We’re discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.”
Reversing course: Cookies, small bits of code that allow advertisers to track users across the open web, represent a hefty chunk of the $180 billion programmatic ad-tech industry. Since Google first announced it was getting rid of cookies in 2020, advertisers have been in a will they, won’t they, with the tech giant repeatedly kicking its own deadline to phase out the tech down the road.
In place of cookies, Google had pushed an initiative called Privacy Sandbox, which was intended to preserve the mechanisms of online advertising while protecting user privacy. Its rollout, though, has been bumpy. Early reports from ad-tech companies showed that without cookies, publishers could lose, in some cases, between 30% and 60% of their revenue.
In announcing the (apparent) survival of cookies, Google pushed back on those reports, claiming in a separate note that in its own tests, Ad Manager publishers saw a revenue drop of 20% while revenue for AdSense publishers dropped by 18%. That’s an improvement over a study from 2019, which showed an average revenue loss of 52% for top Ad Manager publishers, the company said.
Zoom out: While cookies could live another day, what exactly this new user experience could be—or how advertisers will reach users through it—remains unclear, and a Google spokesperson declined to comment on the record about what the new approach will look like.