What is the impact of strict #privacy regulation on content supply and demand?
In Sept 2019, YouTube paid a record $170M to settle charges it violated children’s privacy law (#COPPA). We use this to study the "privacy-for-content" tradeoff. 1/11
Beginning Jan 2020, YouTube identified kids content and eliminated all related personalization including: personalized ads, search, content recommendations, & commenting.
This matches FTC's proposed rules to strengthen COPPA announced yesterday: 2/ bit.ly/3RMARdf
YouTube creators worried these changes amounted to the "COPPAcalypse."
We study 5,066 top U.S. YouTube channels by comparing child-directed content creators to their non-child-directed counterparts using a difference-in-differences design. 3/
We show child-directed content creators produce 18% less content and pivot towards producing non-child-directed content.
Ad price data is not public, but one creator shared with us that ad prices fell 73% without personalized ads. 4/
🚨New result #1🚨 Child-directed channels also reduced their share of original content by 11% (7.7 p.p.): e.g., by creating compilations of old content.
We quantify duplicate content using video transcripts to identify chunks of text that appear in a channel's prior releases. 5/
🚨New result #2🚨 Child-directed channels reduce their share of manual captioning by 26% (3.8 p.p.). Manual captions reduce errors in automated captions. Captioning helps viewers who are hard of hearing & helps children learn vocabulary & reading. 6/
The original content & manual captioning results suggest that child-directed channels invest less in quality. We also find user ratings (like/view ratio) falls 10% reflecting this & YouTube's degraded capacity to match viewers to content. 7/
On the demand side, views of child-directed channels fell by 20% & channel subscriptions fall 25%.
We emphasize that our data consists of channels in the education, entertainment, & film + animation verticals. Impact on educational channels is similar. 8/
Consistent with the YouTube's degraded capacity to match viewers to content, we find that content creation (L) and especially content views (R) become more concentrated among large child-directed YouTube channels. 9/
FTC wants stronger #COPPA, EU’s #DSA bans personalized ads for kids <18 & proposed COPPA 2.0 raises age from 13 to 16.
The social benefit of kids’ privacy may exceed the cost to content supply & demand, but regulators should keep this in mind. 10/
Read the paper here: "COPPAcalypse? The YouTube settlement’s impact on kids content” w/ @TesaryLin, James Cooper, & Liang Zhong
➡️ END ssrn.com/abstract=44303…
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We study the "privacy-for-content" tradeoff using the 2019 YouTube COPPA settlement.
"COPPAcalypse? The YouTube settlement’s impact on kids content” w/ @TesaryLin, James Cooper, & Liang Zhong
➡️ ssrn.com/abstract=44303… 1/9
Data sharing increases ad revenue, which pays for free content, & helps personalize websites to better find the content we want. On the other hand, people want more privacy online: especially for kids.
The YouTube settlement shows the consequences of strict privacy regulation. 2/
In Sept. 2019, YouTube paid a record $170M to settle charges it violated children’s privacy law (COPPA). Beginning Jan. 2020, YouTube identified kids content and eliminated all related personalization including: personalized ads, search, content recommendations, & commenting. 3/
Regulators & researchers seek to balance privacy & the data economy. The EU’s #GDPR is a landmark & influential regulation that defines personal data expansively. GDPR establishes:
-rules for data processing,
-rights for EU residents,
-responsibilities for firms, &
-BIG fines. 2/
#GDPR is hard to study:
A) Finding a suitable control group is hard because the GDPR had global spillovers. E.g., it affects EU firms & non-EU firms serving EU residents.
B) GDPR can screw with personal data: e.g., you may only see data from consenting users. 3/
🧵Explainer for the Topics API 🧵
Google announced the Topics API for Privacy Sandbox🏖️. Topics is basically FLoC v2.0. Google is deftly replacing FLoC v1 with a more anodyne technology and name...
Details: developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-s… 1/8
Topics allows for interest-based ads without 3rd party cookies. Most research, including our own, shows ad prices are 2-3X higher with cookies.
Put concretely: Interest-based ads help fund content that is socially valuable, but uninteresting to advertisers. 2/
In Topics, the browser classifies begins by classifying the sites that users visit into topics from a list of ~350 readable & benign topics like cats🐈 or hockey🏒.
To do so, sites must opt in and users can opt out. 3/
Thread explaining FLEDGE (formerly TURTLEDOVE).
Online advertising generates value for publishers, advertisers, & users. Now, Google & others are proposing alternatives that preserve this value while better protecting user privacy under the "Privacy Sandbox" proposals. 1/12
The public discussion of #PrivacySandbox is dominated by #FLoC, but many tech solutions are required to satisfy advertising use cases while protecting privacy. In particular, #FLEDGE propose more fundamental & interesting changes to the status quo. 2/
The key to FLEDGE is to move user targeting information onto the *browser*, rather than broadcasting a cookie ID to the adtech ecosystem so advertisers can bid on ad opportunities based on what they know about that cookie ID. The prototypical FLEDGE use-case is retargeting. 3/
🧵We recently released a big update to our working paper examining how the #GDPR affected the site traffic💻 & ecommerce revenue💶 of EU users. (w/ @samgarvingold & Scott Shriver) 1/11 ssrn.com/abstract=34217… (image: Digiday)
We partnered with @Adobe to study the GDPR’s impact on EU users across 1,084 firm site analytics dashboards. Our data contain 77 of the top 1K sites & >700 long tail sites below the top 100K. We see >$0.75 billion in EU spending and 4.4 billion EU pageviews in total per week. 2/
We observe rich site outcomes in Adobe data. But, after the GDPR, we stop observing data from non-consenting users. If recorded site traffic falls post-GDPR, we want to know:
A) how much did GDPR hurt real outcomes of websites?
B) how much did consent limit data recording? 3/
In 2020, the Dutch public broadcaster NPO got rid of cookies and saw its revenues improve. This is held up as a hopeful example that privacy and publisher monetization can coexist. I want to share three comments. 🧵 1/8 wired.com/story/can-kill…
NPO claims that revenue rose 70% year-over-year in the first 2 months without cookies. This is an impressive achievement unlocked by building their own ad server, next generating contextual targeting, marketing to advertisers, etc. 2/ brave.com/publisher-3rd-…
Comment #1: This case study is hard to assess because year-over-year changes are far from apples-to-apples comparisons. Much can change between years that would confound our interpretation--beyond the many changes NPO implemented. 3/