By Seb Joseph and Julia Tabisz • February 2, 2024 • 5 min read •
Ivy Liu
As Google phases out third-party cookies in Chrome, the idea of them disappearing by the end of the year has become about as clear as a foggy day in London.
Behind-the-scenes of the cookie deprecation timeline:
- Google needs CMA’s approval to end third-party cookies in Chrome.
- CMA examines details for 60-120 days, putting Google in a tight spot.
- If it takes the full 120 days, Google must say goodbye to cookies by September, potentially affecting holiday ads.
- Early 2025 seems like a safe bet for the phase-out.
In fact, some ad executives are putting their money on cookies waving goodbye sometime in the first quarter of next year. They just can’t see it happening anytime before then, despite Google’s insistence that they will be gone before the year is done — especially not when the market considers that its alternative (the Privacy Sandbox) is looking nowhere near ready to pick up the slack.
These suspicions have been simmering for quite some time — Business Insider first raised the red flag back in November. Since then, these doubts have taken more shape, particularly after a month of tinkering with the Sandbox on that modest one percent of Chrome traffic stripped of cookies. That’s according to what marketers, publishers and ad tech vendors have openly shared with Digiday over this period, as well as a poll we conducted among Digiday+ Research respondents.
Just over half (56%) of the 121 marketing professionals who were surveyed over the last two weeks said they agree that Google will get rid of third-party cookies in the Chrome browser before the end of the year. Over a third (37%) disagreed — meaning they anticipate it happening at the absolute earliest in the first quarter of 2025. Only 7% of those surveyed admitted to being unsure either way.
We’ve broken down the responses further in these graphs. When you consider the responses together, it’s clear that a notable portion of the industry is increasingly skeptical about Google’s capacity to meet its self-imposed deadline.
And now, the U.K.’s Competitions and Markets Authority has cast more shadows over the Sandbox’s future. In its quarterly update on its ongoing investigation into whether the sandbox is anti-competitive, it’s abundantly clear — even if not explicitly stated — that the regulator still holds significant reservations about it.
Among these concerns is that the Sandbox seems to fall short in supporting all current ad tech use cases and business practices. It may also lack the interoperability seen in solutions relying on third-party cookies. This could lead to advertisers shifting their budgets away from the open display market and into the “walled gardens” owned by giants like Google, Meta or Amazon, all with extensive access to first-party data. » …
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