Well, folks, it’s happened again. For the third time, Google pushed back its original deadline to remove third-party cookies from Chrome. On Tuesday, it said it would no longer remove cookies in 2024, and didn’t set a new deadline for removal.
On this week’s episode, the editorial team talks through this latest announcement from Google, and how the delay will affect the rest of ad tech’s plans to go cookieless.
But first, how did we get here? Leading up to this moment, it seemed like Google would finally quit cookies.
At the beginning of this year, Google removed cookies for 1% of Chrome traffic in January, which is more than it has done over the previous four years. With promises backed up by action, many believed Google’s assertion that it would fully remove cookies in the second half of 2024.
At the same time that Google was planning to deprecate third-party cookies, the pushback on its replacement, the Privacy Sandbox, intensified.
The IAB Tech Lab released a scathing report showing all the areas where its Privacy Sandbox Task Force deemed a replacement wasn’t ready in February. And industry testers shared a chorus of concerns about details of the Privacy Sandbox, from latency to its in-browser decisioning to its waterfall-like auction setup that seemed to preference Google. The business implications of these complicated technical details are still being untangled by the ad tech community.
Meanwhile, almost every ad tech company now has some sort of cookieless solution, with varying levels of performance or adoption. And other mobile browsers and apps don’t use cookies – but often, seem like they still can’t entice buyers to shift budget from cookie-enriched Chrome. With the latest pushback, ad tech remains in limbo. It’s a strange place to be. But we’re here with you to talk it out.
