Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25
Digiday+ Research: Many publishers can’t reach most of their audience with alternate identifiers
This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series →
When agencies and advertisers began casting about for replacements to the third-party cookie, many of them pounced on alternate identifiers.
And while publishers expect that those identifiers will play a key role in how they target and measure ads going forward, at the moment the identifiers are facing a scale issue that will have to get worked out, according to new Digiday+ research.
In November, Digiday asked 76 publisher professionals questions on a number of topics, including how they are preparing for returns to the office, how their employers are dealing with vaccination requirements and how they are adapting their businesses to the deprecation of third-party cookies. Of those 76, 54 respondents indicated they had at least direct knowledge of the company’s plans to replace third-party cookies; a majority of those 54 work directly on the plans.
A significant majority agreed that alternate identifiers will play a “key role” in their ad businesses after Google deprecates third-party cookies. Yet at the moment, the identifiers offer a limited picture of many publishers’ audiences. More than 40% said that they can reach less than half, or none of their audience using these emerging products. When subtracting the responses from panelists who said they did not know, that share rises above 60%.
This limitation is likely to get smoothed out as Google’s 2023 deadline draws closer. But it also helps explain why publishers, who have had their post-cookie game plans set for most of this year, remain worried about the effects that third-party cookie deprecation will have on their businesses.
More in Media
How medical creator Nick Norwitz grew his Substack paid subscribers from 900 to 5,200 within 8 months
Creator Playbook: Unpacking the strategy behind medical YouTuber Nick Norwitz turning to Substack to significantly grow his brand.
Media Briefing: In the AI era, subscribers are the real prize — and the Telegraph proves it
In an era where AI is eroding referral traffic and third-party distribution, a subscriber who pays directly has become the most valuable reader a publisher can own. Springer just bought over a million of them.
Layoffs hit LADbible Group’s social video team amid slower user-generated content growth
Social-first publisher LADbible is in the middle of a second round of layoffs to its social video team, having suffered massive drop-off in Facebook video engagement.