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Gilad Edelman
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In May 2018, when the european Union’s historic privacy law came into force, the General Data Protection Regulation, the leading Dutch public broadcaster, introduced a major experiment: the control of Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, necessarily the BBC of the Netherlands, interpreted the law strictly, deciding that visitors to one of its websites will now be asked to accept or disable cookies , tracking generation that allows personalized ads based on someone’s browsing history.And, unlike maximum companies, which assume that those who ignore a privacy tracking settle for tracking, any NPO guest who clicks past the intrusive consent screen without making a selection would be excluded by default.
The effects are extraordinarily surprising: 90% of users have been removed.
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This is where the advertising generation industry would have predicted a calamity.A study conducted through Google last year, for example, found that disabling cookies reduced publishers’ revenue by more than 50%.(However, a study conducted by an independent team of economists set the cookie premium at only 4%.Needless to say, there were methodological differences.) If Google’s exam was correct, NPO deserved to have gone to a monetary disaster.The opposite turned out to be true. Instead, the company found that ads shown to users who had disabled cookies generated as much or more cash as classified ads for users who had opted.The effects were so strong that in January 2020, NPO simply got rid of advertising cookies.That’s right. And after falling, their virtual income is expanding dramatically, even after the economic surprise of the coronavirus pandemic.
This makes NPO a very tough player in a long-standing debate about the price of targeted advertising.Advertising generation companies, a category governed by Google and Facebook but complete with other actors, claim that microtargeting is better for everyone: users like “relevant” classified ads, advertisers like to succeed in potential consumers, and publishers are paid more for ads ranked with a higher click-through rate.However, a developing evidence framework requires situations in each of these premises.goes far beyond web privacy, involving the viability of journalism and, by extension, the adequacy of democracy.
Most classified classified ads that appear to be next to online content are sold through an automated formula called programmatic advertising.Advertisers don’t decide which site or app their classified ads will appear on.Instead, they made an offer to show their classified ads.classified classified ads for users that fit certain profiles based on their browsing history.The bulk deactivation of NPO cookies made this option suddenly unavailable to 90% of its visitors.
Like many publishers, NPO relied on Google Ad Manager to sell its ad space, but now it needed a platform of choice that didn’t stick to users, an option that Google doesn’t offer.The paintings of creating one is the duty of the NPO advertising agency.It only took a weekend to start.
“We were chatting on a Thursday,” recalls Tom van Bentheim, who at the time was guilty of programmatic advertising at Ster and is now guilty of virtual strategy, operations and technology.”And we went back to the workplace on Monday, and [our developer] said, “Well, guys, I have a new traditional ad server that can run non-custom ads.”
The new server was rude and may only work through the developer who created it, which means it may not work on a giant scale.But over the next month, Ster proved to be a vital point: top advertisers were willing to buy classified ads that weren’t a goal based on user behavior.”I think the first month we made 100,000 euros,” van Bentheim said.”And we think, my God, that’s anything, we have to make it evolutionary.”Therefore, Ster has hired a Dutch company, Ortec, to build a new advertising server for NPO.The migration took a year.
Like the Google product, the new formula is automatic. When a user visits an NPO page, a sign is automatically sent to advertisers inviting them to bid to show their ad to the user.But there’s a difference: with Google and with the maximum of other ad servers., advertisers bid on the user. With Ster’s new ad server, advertisers are blind: they don’t get user data, but get data about what the user is looking for.Pages and videos are categorized based on their content.A particular type of customer, advertisers target consumers who read a certain type of item or who look at a certain type of screen.
This approach, known as contextual advertising, goes back to the days leading up to microtargeting: until the last decade, when a company was looking to succeed in a certain type of reader, it had to buy an ad with a publication whose audience was likely to accompany it.But the generation has allowed contextual targeting to be much more accurate, to paintings at the website level, rather than publication. NPO advertisers can pay to promote it in express content. It turns out that the Dutch edition of Farmer Wants a Wife is still very popular in the Netherlands, but you can also choose to promote it on one of the 23 “custom channels of interest” that are based on a user’s bed or appearance (the software scrapes the subtitles to mark the video).come with things like sports and fitness, love and dating, faith and faith, politics and politics.
In 2019, Ster conducted an experiment with 10 other advertisers, adding American Express, to compare the functionality of classified classified ads presented to users who chose to participate in tracking or not.For the maximum vital statistic, conversions (the proportion of other people who ended up taking the action that interested the advertiser, either by adding an item to the shopping cart or by signing up for a subscription or credit card), the contextual classified ads also did, if not better, than microtargetés.
“When do other people need to buy a Snickers?” said van Bentheim, recalling a verbal exchange he had with someone who worked at an advertising agency.”It is not because a user has an age or region express or has a high income; it’s because he’s hungry and for food at the time.”
Overall, the new seatless ad server worked so well that NPO abandoned cookies altogether from 2020.Since January, visitors are no longer even invited to log in or reject; the site just doesn’t stick to anyone.The effects are amazing. In January and February of this year, according to NPO, its revenue from virtual advertising increased by 62% and 79%, respectively, compared to last year. Even after the coronavirus pandemic rocked the global economy and led brands to particularly reduce advertising, and forced many publications to put wage cuts and layoffs into effect: NPO’s revenues remain double-digit than last year.
The main explanation is simple: since the network is no longer based on the generation of microtargeté programmatic advertising, it now maintains what advertisers spend rather than giving a massive reduction to an intermediary organization.A report from the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers found that some of the cash spent through advertisers was absorbed through advertising generation corporations before publishers ran the ads.Even Google publicly states that when an advertiser and publisher use Google’s platforms to buy and sell programmatic ads, Google takes more than 30% of the cash.considering other actors in the global hyper-complicated virtual advertising, as well as the ever-present challenge of fraudulent sites that absorb money in exchange for false clicks.
“Something goes to DMP, anything goes to DSP, anything is going to trade, anything goes to SSP,” said Linda Worp, Ster Product Manager, describing how they pay for programmatic classified ads.(Those initials: knowledge control platform, demand-side platform, and supply-side platform).”Then, after all the parts, the editor comes in.”However, because the contextual ad server does not depend on tracking, it makes the broker’s tangle largely obsolete; the cash goes directly from the advertiser to the publisher, minus a small payment to the company that operates the ad server.
The delight of NPUs is perhaps the most powerful counterexample of some of the most important claims made in defense of targeted advertising based on online user tracking.It is meant to help publishers make cash, however NPO has been making much more money since leaving cookies.It is intended to provide users with classified ads that they prefer to see, however, NPO users have overwhelmingly refused to exchange relevance for tracking.Of course, we are talking about a case, but it raises the question of whether any other than advertising generation benefits from the prestige quo.
However, that’s not to say that US publishers can just abandon mass microtargeting right now and start raising more money. The European market has stricter privacy laws, and with more users opting out of tracking, there is more need for advertising. According to van Bentheim, part of NPO’s immediate good fortune was due to the fact that advertisers saw privacy written on the wall and were eager to know whether an undirected advertising platform could produce results. For states, on the other hand, that do not have a national privacy law, there are still very few barriers to advertising in extensive oversight.
“It would be tricky for many publications in the U.S. to have the same experience, in precisely the same way, that NPO has done right now, because the nature of the marketplace is that, essentially, cash flows to the maximum invasive.option,” said Aram Zucker-Scharff, director of advertising engineering for The Washington Post’s research, experimentation and progression team.”If you to target users, you the maximum accurate point of user targeting.”
One of the main reasons journalism has noticed a decade of brutal layoffs and bankruptcies is that its monetary base, advertising, has been diverted to corporations that specialize in knowledge to track other people online.Google accounts for nearly 70% of virtual advertising profits in the United States.
This leaves the editors fighting for the remaining portion of the cake.”If one publisher makes the decision to disable everything [tracking] and another decides to leave everything on, and they are not limited through THE GDPR in the same way as publishers in the Netherlands, the effects will be different.Array’ Zucker,” Scharff said.
It is possible that the US will not be able to do so. But it’s not the first time You’re not yet in the point of Europe, but if you look up, you can see symptoms pointing in one direction: expanding the call for privacy for users and legislators, expanding the use of privacy teams that block classified ads and trackers, Google’s closing phase.Third-party cookies: all of this can also foreshadow a shift to something more like the Dutch station’s model.
“We’re going to have a more personal Internet. This will involve generation or regulation, or whether users download or extensions they use or how they interact with publishers through subscriptions or other mechanisms,” Zucker-Scharff said.I think context is essentially the long term of Internet advertising, and what they do on NPO is pretty much what each and every publisher is going to have to do.”
Anyway, it’s a view. There are other possibilities. Google critics say that the close removal of third-party cookies in Chrome will only affect Google’s market position, because if no one else can stick to you on the Internet, the knowledge that Chrome collects when you are hooked up to the browser becomes the maximum value.Meanwhile, corporations in the “identity resolution” sector are striving to expand tactics to facilitate microtargeting in a post-cookie world.It’s not transparent if the U.S. advertising marketis getting a point of focusing on privacy. (Some media corporations, adding the New York Times and WIRED editor Condé Nast, are experimenting with a hybrid route, abandoning third-party cookies while allowing advertisers to target users based on so-called first-party knowledge collected through the publisher can only paint if they have millions of subscribers connected).
However, if confidentiality prevails, and if the delight of OSFL is a guide, then the long term of virtual publishing may be one in which a large amount of money will go to organizations that produce the articles that other people need to read and if advertisers start paying to appear in a secure context rather than targeting a secure user , this will gain advantages for publishers whose content is smart and will ruin the long road to poor quality or downright fraudulent sites that lately absorb much of the cash spent on automated programmatic advertising.
“The advertising currently being delivered through users and third-party cookies, but in the long term it will be based on content,” Zucker-Scharff said.”When it’s user-based, what users read are fewer topics than this long user history.But in a world of contextual guidance, there are many benefits for publishers who create quality content, because that’s what determines the destination of advertising money on the web.”
It also doesn’t mean that only the most important players can make it work.Johnny Ryan, principal investigator at the Irish Civil Liberties Council, analyzed NPO’s knowledge and found that even its smaller affiliates made particularly more money after the corporation abandoned cookies.For example, Omroep MAX, an NPO publication aimed at others over the age of 50, is the 4,539 ranked site in the Netherlands, according to the knowledge of the SimilarWeb traffic measurement site.Still, his profit was more than 92% last year.”The appeal here is that this example of a national broadcaster also applies to smaller publishers,” Ryan said.Of course, Omroep MAZ has the merit of Ster and its advertising platform.To recreate this success, other small publishers will most likely have to hire an outdoor auction house.
Tom van Bentheim and Linda Worp, the Ster workers who put the new system into effect, are eager for other publishers to adopt it.Each week, they license complete programs for their advertising server.But there is a problem: according to Dutch law, they explained that Ster is NPO’s exclusive agent, which means that you are not allowed to license your ad server to other publishers, which is very frustrating for van Bentheim and Worp.
“We can’t do the same with other publishers,” Worp said. “We have to. We need to complement the entire ecosystem with our solution.”
Update 8-5-2020, 10:45 am EDT: This story has been updated to load Johnny Ryan’s association with the Irish Civil Liberties Council.