Publishers’ Privacy Sandbox pauses settle into a deep freeze following reports of poor performance

“We 100% divested from Privacy Sandbox testing once they pushed the timeline on deprecation,” said Justin Wohl, CRO of Snopes and TV Tropes. “The resources needed to test against that — and the knowledge that it’s not even representative of the full demand pool being pointed to that inventory — just makes it unsustainable for small shops to do this work.”

While two other publishers have continued to test the Sandbox as part of larger entities’ experiments, like with Mediavine or Criteo, the publishing execs agreed that allocating the time in-house just isn’t worth the insights that can be gleaned from the mere 1% of Chrome impressions that no longer have third-party cookies.

Unwind Media, for instance, is testing in the Privacy Sandbox via its partnerships with OpenX, Pubmatic, Index Exchange and Google. But these investments have not changed since the deprecation delay announcement, said svp of programmatic revenue and strategy, Emry DowningHall.

One publisher exec, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said they participate in Criteo’s tests and would like to do more to independently test the Privacy Sandbox so Google can stay on its cookie deprecation timeline. But ultimately, “we can’t over-index on the amount of resourcing or anything that we’re putting towards it,” they said.

The juice isn’t worth the squeeze

For independent publishers or ones that lack significant scale, 1% of impressions is not a big enough pool to independently determine if the Privacy Sandbox is working, DowningHall said. And that’s why insights from both supply-side platforms (Index and Criteo) and publisher sales houses (Mediavine and Raptive) earlier this year are critical for publishers to determine the value of the Sandbox.

Criteo’s report found that publishers would lose 60% of their ad revenue if they used the Privacy Sandbox versus third-party cookies for their ad businesses. Its test spanned eight weeks between March 18 and May 12, covering 1,200 publishers and 18,000 advertisers.

Index Exchange’s report, on the other hand, found that publishers’ CPMs would fall 33% on Sandbox-enabled impressions compared to impressions purchased using a third-party cookie. Its tests were conducted on 100 publishers, thousands of domains and 10 DSPs, and also revealed that the Sandbox was marginally better performing compared to inventory that didn’t have cookies or the Sandbox (like the Safari browser), which had 36% lower CPMs.

“I’m not surprised at all that there is that kind of a drop, because much in the same way that Criteo compared [the Privacy Sandbox] to Safari, [if] you take away any kind of cookies or targeting … you just go to basic contextual at that point,” said Wohl. 

Latency, too, is an issue that both Criteo and Index flagged. Index reported a 28% increase in latency for Privacy Sandbox auctions and Criteo stated that the Sandbox would slow down publisher sites by more than 100%. Both of these delays would lead to lost revenue for publishers. 

Waiting for the Privacy Sandbox to ripen 

Criteo reported that the publisher adoption rate of the Privacy Sandbox is below 55% and will likely remain that way for some time. But publishers said that it’ll take more adoption from advertisers and further deprecation of the cookie to get them to seriously test the Sandbox themselves.

“Most importantly, more buy-side adoption [is necessary] to know that if we put the work into testing, that it is actually representative of what the future state would be, versus just being representative of whoever’s testing it right now,” said Wohl. 

Beyond that, Wohl said more concrete timelines for deprecation and a “major tool suite upgrade from Google” that allows for direct support from Ad Manager and Google Analytics in testing the Sandbox would “catch my interest.”