Google’s Ban on Third-party Cookies Could Actually Harm User Privacy

Reading Time: 3 minutes

There was quite a lot of coverage earlier this month when Google announced that they would be phasing out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years. The stock price of firms like Criteo, which rely heavily on third-party cookie data for their core business, dipped sharply. The general consensus has been that this was a welcome move in terms of user privacy – but nixing third-party cookies could actually harm user privacy, by making it harder to identify irresponsible sharing of user data.

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La Rentrée

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Every September in France, summer-weary parents pack their children off to school for la rentrée (‘the return’) and return to work after the idleness of August. The break from the métro, boulot, dodo routine of daily life enables both students and their parents to throw themselves back into their work and studies with renewed vigor. … Read more

GDPR: Breaking the Third-party Data Habit

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Ah, GDPR. Like the guy (or girl) you matched with on Tinder six months ago who got less interesting the more you got to know them, it just won’t go away. It keeps sliding into your DMs with teasing headlines like, “Data Protection Authority of Baden-Württemberg Issues First German Fine Under the GDPR” or “Washington Post offers invalid cookie consent under EU rules“. And there you were thinking you were done with it back in May, when you sent all your users that “Please respond to this email to stay on our mailing list” email and threw that giant banner about cookies up on your website.

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Building the Perfect Display Ad Performance Dashboard, Part II – metrics

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Welcome to the second installment in my Building the Perfect Display Ad Performance Dashboard series (Note to self: pick a shorter title for the next series). In the first installment, we looked at an overarching framework for thinking about ad monetization performance, comprised of a set of key measures and dimensions. In this post, we’ll … Read more

PubMatic kicks us when we’re down (but gently)

Reading Time: 3 minutes

As if we weren’t all feeling gloomy enough already, PubMatic has just released its Q4 2008 Ad Price Index report, which makes for sobering reading. For those of you not familiar with PubMatic, they provide “multi-network optimization” for publishers who are looking to maximize the yield on their remnant ad inventory (i.e. the inventory the … Read more

Whence the universal tag?

Reading Time: 7 minutes

With another E-metrics Summit over (sans me, sadly), it’s clear that interest in web analytics and online measurement remains high, even (or especially) in these troubled times. But as the technology sets for online advertising and web analytics continue to merge and overlap, one urgent question remains unanswered: what are we going to do about … Read more

Online Ad Business 101, Part III – Ad Networks

Reading Time: 7 minutes

So far in my nascent Online Ad Business 101 series, I’ve covered the overall advertising value chain, and looked at a superficial level at how an ad ‘call’ is actually handled. This installment brings together themes from those two first posts, by taking a look at ad networks. As I have mentioned before, ad networks … Read more