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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

They do need cookies for advertising. Have you ever sold online advertising before?

Current advertising networks use cookies for analytics and cross site profiling. While useful for advertisers it does have privacy implications and there is no, technical, reason why an advertising network could not serve advertisements without the 3rd party cookies.

I think rmc is saying ads only require cookies because ad networks require them, but they're not absolutely necessary. Newspapers, magazines, billboards, TV ads, and other physical media don't have the equivalent of cookies and companies still pay to advertise that way. I don't know anything about advertising but I don't see why an online ad couldn't just consist of a jpg or text, a url and a contract between 2 parties. Obviously that type of ad wouldn't just be a JS snippet you drop into a page. I'm picturing a process like 1. Create some good content 2. Show it to an perspective advertiser with a 'Your Ad Here' placeholder 3. Agree to display an exclusive ad for a certain amount of time. The advertiser can check you're actually showing the ad however they do for physical media. They can also estimate it's effectiveness however they do for physical media. Obviously reputation would play a big role. If the content creator becomes popular enough advertisers will flock to them, if they're just starting out they'll have to solicit companies to sell advertising at a super low prices or give it away for a while. People would have to talk to each other, establish a little trust with each other and take a few monetary risks but isn't that what business is all about? The JS snippet ads could stay around too, but if this law spreads, which I hope it does NOT, it's going to annoy the hell out of people, a browser plugin is more annoying IMO, so that's not the solution. Again, I don't jack about advertising so I'm probably just being idealistic.

Print publications have circulation audits. TV has ratings. Cookies ad similar legitimacy for websites. It also enables much more in depth accountability which has created a massive new advertising market that could not exist without it (good luck with CPC without cookies). If the same could happen in print or broadcast it most definitely would be used.

Websites have ratings in all kinds of varieties and could have audits of some kind. Maybe the techniques for estimating ratings, audits and click-through without cookies can't be completely automated or 100% accurate, but so what, someone can make a business out of doing that well. Maybe website owners would have to start allowing ad companies to run some code on their servers, LOL. I'm sure cookie like strategies could happen in print and broadcast with extreme measures but it would be expensive and the privacy violations would likely be so glaringly obvious that no one would stand for it. Just because it's easy to do and hide on the web doesn't mean it should be done. CPC is just one business model, maybe it's not the only feasible one. I'm not saying I despise the current model or that I think that law is a good idea, I don't even care about privacy myself and I don't want to have to click more buttons than I have to, but many people do care and have no idea how deeply they're being tracked. Some think something should be done about that, enough to influence some governments. I'm sure there are a lot of historical failed attempts at other models but a lot has changed, I don't think it could hurt to at least consider implementing some other ideas, new and old. Not me of course, someone else.

It would be perfectly possible to serve ads without cookies (they work just fine if you disable cookies, after all).

However, none of the big advertising networks is going to let the additional value of tracking customer behavior and targeted advertising slip through their fingers.

That's not the same as "needing" cookies for advertising, though, and it is indeed what the directive was meant to put a stop to (among other things).

I presume you have never sold an online ad? While yes, you can technically do anything you'd like, in reality online advertising requires cookies.

I talked over a deal yesterday and like most online campaigns it included a frequency cap (in this case 1/24 for desktop and 2/24 for mobile). You cannot do a frequency cap without cookies. I could have instead tried to sell a static image or whatever you think would work, but that deal would not have gotten done. This was a CPM campaign, so let's forget that as a possibility. How would affiliate advertising work without cookies (hint: it doesn't). So that's out too. Let's try CPC. Perhaps you can do the leg-work for me and find someone willing to pay me per click for anonymous users that may or may not exist, but I have yet to find one.

This is all ignoring the fact that without cookies you have absolutely no idea how much inventory you have and what its profile looks like. Say you get 1M page views a month, but no advertiser in the world cares about that they want to know how many unique visit[ors] you get. A forum with 1M page views could have 10k members and be nearly worthless to advertisers, but a blog with 1M page views could be 500k unique visitors that are very desirable for advertisers. Without cookies you don't know and the result is you won't sell ads. It's very simple.

That's exactly my point? You do not technically need cookies to serve ads. You just find it highly desirable to do so. And yes, I am totally aware that ad networks have built their business models around having this information available and that the marketplace has been shaped by these business model. That still doesn't make them needed in a technical sense. If cookies had never existed, then we'd still have online advertising, just as we have advertising in other media that lack this form of feedback.

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