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Comment by don_draper | Hacker News Reader

Google is in the ad business making it tougher for them to go in this direction. Go Firefox

> Users of this build of Firefox must directly interact with a site or company for a cookie to be installed on their machine.

There are not many users that don't interact with google. While I don't expect the chrome team to add this to their feature list (even as optional), if they did, it would not really hurt google. It would actually hurt all the other "smaller" players.

Chrome will probably never make this the default, unfortunately. But, this is an option in Chrome.

Settings > Show Advanced > Privacy > Content settings... > Block third-party cookies and site data.

It's not exactly obvious, of course. :-)

This isn't exactly the same as blocking third-party cookies, and Firefox was capable of that since forever.

Firefox is going to accept third-party cookies only from sites that you already browsed before, kinda like Safari does it now.

It is my understanding that Google uses separate domains like doubleclick.net for serving ads, not google.com, so they won't gain any particular advantage there. Of course, that could change.

As I understand it, they serve those assets from the Google.com domain for safari and could do so for this.

>It would actually hurt all the other "smaller" players

Exactly. But it's not neccesary a bad thing though.

What all the "smaller players" in emerging retracking field - where 3rd party cookies are used in the first place - are doing now is nothing conceptually different from "ah, you've added iPhone to shopping cart at shopX! Now we'll show you iPhone ads for a week on every site you visit!". And user is beating her head against the wall because she bought the iPhone offile a week ago.

If 3rd party cookies will be disabled by default in significant part of browsers, all that players will need to find a ways to add some value visible to users and show it to them and convince them to enable 3rd party cookies manually because that will be just the only way to track them.

We don't know yet what that added value(s) could be, but I'm sure they will be invented. And that would be good thing.

You're right that these retargeting shops have a stupid thesis and can only exist because marketers' metrics haven't evolved enough yet (and that's changing). Highest purchase % doesn't mean you changed intent or created business, you just won the bidding war to show an ad to someone who was already going to buy, or maybe already bought.

But users will never manually enable 3rd party cookies, even if they agreed with you that the ads were adding value (which odds are they never will either).

Content has to be monetized in some way -- if not ads, then how?

All that blocking 3rd party cookies will accomplish is put most of the less technically-mature shops out of business while the smart ones figure out a way to route around using the exact same data science for targeting.

> Content has to be monetized in some way -- if not ads, then how?

Charge for it perhaps?

I guess. The NYT/WSJ are trying that already because they don't get enough from ads to do original reporting; ads can barely fund recycled opinion pieces from bloggers as a full-time job. Results are decidedly mixed.

>But users will never manually enable 3rd party cookies, even if they agreed with you that the ads were adding value

It depends. Maybe not the ads per se would be added value, will see anyway.

And by the way, ads may be the content on its own, don't you think? Ask anyone of 30+ mln people who had viewed last Pepsi&Jeff Gordon commercial on YouTube for example.

Is your criticism of retargeting based in experience? I'd love to hear more about it.

I work at a "retargeting shop" and our customers test the crap out of our tools to make sure we're actually driving results. Others may use more smoke and mirrors, but when done right, retargeting does in fact change user behavior and generate ROI.

Well, there are situations where retargeting makes a bit of sense, like selling business services on a low-traffic website.

But most e-commerce retargeting, IMHO, is trading on the fact that a naive marketing manager will put too much stock in a high conversion percentage. All of those people were, by definition, aware of the product and actively shopping. Did you create a customer? Probably not, maybe by virtue of them clicking the ad instead of going somewhere else, but that's still pretty zero-sum.

Prospecting for people who haven't previously clicked the item on your site, but would be interested, is a lot harder and potentially more valuable.

All IMHO of course.

sophisticated marketers have done hold-out tests with retargeting shown that it can drive incremental sales at a profitable roi. this includes big ecommerce brands.

granted not every viewthrough and clickhtrough conversion is driven by the advertising, but some definitely are and it is often profitable if a campaign is optimized and run well.

It could very easily be seen as a monopolistic move on their part if they were to move in that direction oddly enough.

This change will hurt small players in web advertising, but I suspect they are more likely to use shady tracking tactics than the big players. So fewer players consolidates user information, but I hope it makes those advertisers easier to track and regulate.

Indeed, they've been caught using a bug to bypass the same restrictions in iOS.

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