‘We’re not investing right now’: Publishers skeptical as ID tech comes knocking

These are heady times for larger publishers.

Thanks to the demise of the third-party cookie, they’re finally in a position where the rest of the industry has to listen to them. For years, their role was little more than a provider of users — at a price that kept dropping. The data they owned from the journalism they published meant little. Now, everyone wants in on it. After all, this data is crucial to serving relevant ads sans cookies.

Just ask the organizations pushing cookieless identifiers queuing up to strike deals with publishers. From Prebid’s Universal ID 2.0 to LiveRamp’s IdentityLink the list of cookie-replacing tech is long and getting longer.

Often, these cookie replacements require some form of authenticated ID (like an email) to make them work, and that’s most likely going to come from publishers. But some publishers, especially the larger ones, have reservations. They wonder why they should give up this data to prop up advertising outside the biggest tech platforms and not be able to extract the appropriate value it creates. When you serve at the leisure of everyone else, you can only get so rich.

“We’re skeptical of sharing this sort of data with the broader ecosystem because there’s a risk that it ends in a situation where you have ad tech vendors building these huge databases on our audiences that we have no control over so we’re back to square one of publishers just being providers of users and not journalism,” said Thomas Lue Lytzen, director of sales and ad tech at one of Denmark’s biggest news publishers Ekstra Bladet.

And that’s before concerns over whether these solutions are even privacy-compliant are considered. Google brought those doubts into sharp focus recently when it said alternatives identifiers, like Unified ID 2.0, wouldn’t pass muster with either regulators or consumers.

For those solutions to work they need scale. And the way they plan to get it is by asking anyone who logs into one publisher to also give their consent to being tracked across other publishers that are using the same identifier technology. Put another way: these identifiers are predicated on someone’s personal data being shared between different companies, which some publishers feel is too similar to how cookies were used.

Just ask The New York Times, which thinks tracking people this way sounds sketchy and so isn’t on board. Or there’s Ekstra Bladet. The Danish publisher has no immediate plans for those identifiers. Even Ozone, a U.K.-based alliance that includes publishers ranging from The Guardian to Stylist Group, isn’t sure they’re viable solutions long-term.

As varied as these privacy concerns are, they often boil down to three tension points.

First, there’s the fact that people might not want to be tracked by companies they’ve never heard of. And even if they did agree, there’s the risk that the more companies who access their data the less secure the whole process becomes. Finally, there’s the political fallout: publishers risk the ire of privacy-preaching tech platforms or …read more

Source:: Digiday