Why some publishers worry identity tech could slow down their sites

By Kate Kaye

The race to replace the third-party cookie risks leaving publishers with sluggish sites if an overload of alternate identifiers offsets any speed gained from sites shedding the cookie.

As identity tech firms scramble to get publishers to adopt their cookie-replacing IDs, the tech providers argue there’s not much required of the site owners. Publishers don’t have to pay to support the identifiers; they only need to add some code to their sites. The primary reward, the identity tech firms promise, is higher ad revenue for the publishers based on the ability to recognize the authenticated site visitors that advertisers are looking for. But in addition to the very palpable fear of ceding control over their audience data to identity tech firms, publishers also worry that adding an abundance of new tech could create problems by slowing down site load times.

“I can’t just throw a bunch of identifiers on a page and hope that some work and don’t work,” said Sara Badler, svp advertising and partnerships at Dotdash, which owns publications like Verywell and The Spruce. Badler told Digiday that identity tech vendors tell her, “If you put the tags on the page, there’s very minimal impact… but that’s just not the case.” The potential for any new piece of tech to increase page load time is “the biggest hurdle” to adopting any cookieless identifier, said Badler.

Page load time is a major consideration because of its impact on publishers’ search-driven traffic, Badler said. Dotdash generates around 85% of its visitor traffic through search, and site latency is a factor in search rankings. Google announced in May 2020 that it plans to incorporate a set of user experience metrics called Core Web Vitals, which include page load speed measurements, to determine search rankings. That is leading publishers to take a close look at how IDs may affect their site speeds and, by extension, their traffic and resulting ad revenue.

“We test every ID solution not just for revenue, so we know that it’s helping publishers make more money, but also for performance, using Core Web Vitals and other metrics,” said Don Marti, vp of ecosystem innovation at CafeMedia, which manages ads for small publishers.

Avoiding clunky tech

Ultimately, identity tech providers demand that publishers add another piece of code to their sites — “client-side,” in tech parlance, and it is more than a mere imposition, Badler said. “When you put them client-side, you’re essentially giving them the keys to your house,” she said. As an example of her protective approach, she added, “We didn’t roll out a consent management platform till this year because we were so concerned with how clunky it would be.”

Other execs from publishers including BuzzFeed and Maven, which publishes Sports Illustrated and TheStreet, agreed latency is a factor when evaluating the new crop of ID tech from companies including LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, BritePool and ID5. “[Latency] is absolutely something that has to be considered,” said Maven COO Andrew Kraft, who said he’s interested …read more

Source:: Digiday