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highly recommend everyone read the WSJ @keachhagey report on new research from globally respected academic showing how availability of 3rd party cookies provides little benefit to publishers undermining arguments of importance of behaviorally targeted ads. wsj.com/articles/behav…
At this moment, in California, DC and Brussels, major tech platforms are falsely lobbying that the surveillance of consumers across websites, apps and devices is necessary to fund the free Internet and journalism. This research is deeply problematic for their arguments.
Here is a link to the full study and the abstract lifted from it. It was cited and presented at a major antitrust conference last week, a FTC hearing and will be fully released at a major academic conference. weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/upl…
It's important to note game theory here as no single publisher can pull out of OBA without seeing more significant revenue impact. Regulation or tech that raises the bar equally across all of industry is the only way this plays out in a way to drive value back to publishers.
Of course, that's a major issue for Facebook and Google with any significant data restrictions due to privacy laws as their business model is literally to mine people’s personal data towards extraordinary profits.
It's also why any of these laws need to be shaped to be more restrictive of the larger data miners where there is the most risk and largest ability to undermine them as Google and Facebook have tried to do in the EU hence the many open investigations and decisions playing out.
Anyway, I would just recommend anyone who has doubts or questions read the full research and put any to the authors. they really are experts who care deeply about being accurate and fair. I think you'll find it as solid as research comes.
I say this because there is a lot at stake. Consumers of course want anti-tracking and publishers can align with consumers on new laws (eg CCPA/GDPR). However, Google, Facebook and all of the investment in ad tech are at odds with this research. So we'll hear from them I'm sure.
When the ad tech lobby rumbles (it will), I do hope press asks these same people why they never questioned flimsy research industry - data from Yahoo & Turn if I recall correctly - to suggest OBA was critical for publishers. This pops their myth bubble. aboutads.info/resource/fullv… 
In heat of GDPR, adtech lobby was using this research to argue EU privacy laws would kill publishing. Except when pressed, they admitted to @johnnyryan, "publisher" definition included Google & Facebook. note: they relied on survey data from 30 interviews. iabeurope.eu/wp-content/upl…
So point being, new data restrictions are definitely coming through laws (GDPR/CCPA) and tech (ITP/ETP/Brave, etc). The smart will innovate/recreate. Ad tech is necessary and important, margins just may be smaller. This was my warning in spring 2017. digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2017/03/3…
and yes @bmorrissey, I did write about publishers getting screwed by OBA in 2014 (although your editor wrote the headline) and you probably published me because you already believed it. digiday.com/media/publishe…
speaking of your editor (it was @slarkpope if memory serves) and yes this piece about OBA not being worth as much as the industry tried to claim at least partially led to these researchers being able to spend these years empirically proving it. adage.com/article/datadr…
