Google Trying to Keep the Money Coming in

The “Chocolate Factory”, as Google is sometimes called, is facing an existential threat. Between new privacy laws in the U.S. and other countries and the restrictions on cookies, especially third party cookies, the main mechanisms that Google uses to target ads to you and me, Google’s revenue, 90 percent of which comes from ads, is at risk.

Google has been working on other technologies to try and balance staying out of jail and/or avoiding massive fines with keeping its wallet full, but none yet have been really effective.

The most recent is called the Privacy Sandbox and Google has begun a beta test on a SMALL number of Android 13 devices.

Third party cookies were supposed to go away in 2022. No, wait, 2023. Wait, maybe 2024? Maybe longer.

But ad-tech companies are worried that their coffers may go dry also. After all, if companies don’t see results from their ads, they will pull back, spend less, and look for alternatives. Ones that do not go into the ad-tech companies pockets.

Unfortunately for Google, their Privacy Sandbox is a “collaboration”. Not only does Google have their wants and desires, but so do governments (and they wield a big club), advertisers and ad-tech.

Meanwhile, Google doesn’t seem to be listening to everyone’s concerns.

And users continue to use ad blockers in their browsers. Ad blockers have become such a problem for some sites that they literally block you from visiting their site if you have ad blocking turned on. At that point, people have two choices – disable the ad blocker for that site, maybe one time, or go somewhere else.

The website owner hopes they don’t leave, but that is, often, what does happen. Just like what happens when websites erect paywalls.

Stay tuned as this problem is not going away any time soon.

If you use targeted advertising, tracking this is going to be very important to you.

Credit: The Register

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