Media Briefing: Following Google’s cookie-killing extension, publishers focus on confronting Apple’s Safari problem

By Tim Peterson

This week’s Media Briefing looks at how publishers are hoping that Google’s third-party cookie postponement creates a window of opportunity for the digital advertising industry to deal with the limitations of Apple’s Safari browser.

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Publishers look to pounce on Safari

The digital advertising industry may have received a reprieve from Google cutting off third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. But publishers are hoping the postponement provides a window of opportunity for themselves, advertisers, agencies and ad tech firms to finally confront the escalating issue of Apple’s Safari browser.

The key hits:

The digital ad industry has largely swept the Safari issue under the rug because of third-party cookies’ availability on Chrome’s bigger browser.
Safari’s tracking limitations have capped publishers’ revenue and are becoming a bigger issue as mobile web traffic increases.
Apple’s lack of communication with publishers hasn’t helped matters.
Publishers don’t want browser-specific fixes, but believe that solutions for Safari could be applied to other cookieless browsers — even eventually Chrome.

A festering issue now inflamed

In the four years since Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention to rein in tracking on Safari, publishers have found their ability to profit from ad impressions running on Apple’s browser similarly circumscribed. One publishing executive said their Safari impressions sell for less than half the price of Chrome impressions, and a second publishing executive pegged the difference at 70% lower for Safari versus Chrome. But because Chrome has represented a larger share of the overall browser market — 65% globally in July compared Safari’s 19%, per StatCounter — publishers and advertisers have dealt with the issue by directing more of their efforts and ad budgets to Chrome.

“Apple has been given a bit of a hall pass based on [Safari’s relative] scale and the fact that there were alternatives. Revenue in total wasn’t entirely impacted; it just shifted from one browser to another,” said a third publishing executive.

However, with Google’s Chrome set to become more Safari-like once it kills off the third-party cookie and with mobile traffic likely to increase as people return to life outside their homes, publishers see some urgency for the industry to revoke that proverbial hall pass. A fourth publishing executive said that Safari accounts for half of the mobile traffic and a third of its desktop traffic to their company’s sites.

“The Google delay is going to shift publishers’ focus heavily toward Safari and solving that problem. Two years is a long time away, so I don’t care what happens in Chrome tomorrow because nothing is going to happen. But Safari is a problem,” said the fourth publishing executive.

Safari is not only a more immediate problem, but a growing one. “Now that people are getting out and about again, we’re seeing mobile traffic [increase] again. With the delay of deprecation of third-party cookies, that’s reintroducing that spotlight on …read more

Source:: Digiday