🚨Working paper update!🚨

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

🚨New working paper!🚨

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/

🧵What have economists learned from the #GDPR?
I review the literature for a future NBER book on the "Economics of #Privacy" edited by @ce_tucker & @avicgoldfarb. 1/7
nber.org/books-and-chap… 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/

🧵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/

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/

https://twitter.com/garjoh_canuck/status/1405612777364992009

Happy 3rd birthday🎂 of the #GDPR🇪🇺!

🧵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/

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-…

🤔DO ADS ACTUALLY WORK?🤔
🧵We tackle this question using a large collection of display ad field experiments in a working paper with @EconInformatics & @enub
"The Online Display Ad Effectiveness Funnel & Carryover: Lessons from 432 Field Experiments”
ssrn.com/abstract=27015… 1/8 Recently, the effectiveness of advertising has been called into question. Some of this skepticism is healthy. Measuring the effect of advertising properly is *really* difficult, as I detail here:

https://twitter.com/garjoh_canuck/status/1252625158977830913?s=20

. 2/

🚨Working paper update!🚨
🧵Post-#GDPR, website use of tech vendors fell 15% but relative concentration increased 17%.

"Privacy & market concentration: Intended & unintended consequences of the GDPR” w/ Scott Shriver & @samgarvingold
ssrn.com/abstract=34776…
(Image: Digiday) 1/14 Privacy and competition top today’s policy agenda particularly in tech. Google & Facebook capture 56% of global digital ad spend. They also face regulatory scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic on both counts.
But, could #privacy policy actually reduce #competition? 2/

👻👻👻 WHAT PROBLEM DOES GHOST ADS SOLVE? 👻👻👻
This is THREAD #1 about our 2017 JMR paper "Ghost Ads: Improving the Economics of Measuring Online Ad Effectiveness” with @EconInformatics & @enub
#MarketingAcad #DigitalMarketing #EconTwitter #AdFX 1/9 Advertisers like Macy’s want to know the ROI of their #advertising campaigns. To understand the #incremental effect of ads, Macy’s need to know what consumers would do *had they not advertised*. Ad experiments deliver these answers. 2/

Today, I spoke at the W3C improving web advertising business group about the economics of digital ad identity. Thread🧵 on some takeaways on the future of digital ads. 1/ Cross-site identity (via cookies) allows for behavioral targeting. Importantly, identity allows for less sexy but *critical* functions like ad frequency capping, ad effectiveness measurement & attribution—all at scale. 2/

🔥👿🔥 New working paper alert! 🔥👿🔥
"Inferno: A guide to field experiments in online display advertising"
ssrn.com/abstract=35813…

THREAD: This guide reviews challenges & solutions from a decade of research.
#marketingacad #econtwitter #fieldexperiments “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” - Dante’s Inferno👿
Online display ad experiments are hell. They are also a proving ground for field experimenters, & have much to teach us. The guide is organized into the nine 9 circles of 🔥hell🔥 as applied to #displayad #fieldexperiments

The @guardian featured an opinion piece about how the #GDPR is failing to protect privacy.
The piece serves as an unintentional object lesson of the same. THREAD 1/
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… Here is the excerpt where the author decries prevailing opt-out practices alongside the Guardian’s consent menu doing the same.
Note: The @ICOnews states that this menu is not #GDPR compliant (“NO" should be as easy as "YES"). 2/

🚨New working paper alert!🚨
THREAD: Post-#GDPR, website use of web tech vendors falls 15% but relative concentration increases 17%.

"Privacy & market concentration: Intended & unintended consequences of the GDPR” w/ Scott Shriver
ssrn.com/abstract=34776…
(Image: Digiday) 1/ Privacy and competition top today’s policy agenda—particularly in web tech which relies on permissive privacy practices and where big companies like Google & Facebook have large market share.

But, could #privacy policy actually reduce #competition ? 2/

Google just released a more details about the study showing *publisher revenue* falls 52% without a cookie. They run an experiment disabling cookies for a random sample of users on Google Ad Manager's top 500 publishers in terms of programmatic revenue. 1/
services.google.com/fh/files/misc/… Now, we see that results vary by publisher (below). While the average publisher’s revenue falls by 52%, the median is 64%. Very few publishers see a loss less than 20% while a large number experience losses exceeding 70% (!). 2/

Does behavioral targeting create value? Now, we have 5 academic & industry (grey) studies that quantify how much value is lost without cookies. The loss estimates are: 65%, >66%, 52%, 4%, & 52%. I summarize the studies below. View the literature review slide & more related literature here: docs.google.com/presentation/d…