Digiday survey: Why publishers are ready to end the high cost of third-party cookies and data leakage

We recently conducted a publisher survey with Digiday, examining the costly impact of data leakage from third-party cookies. Below is a brief excerpt of the article.

While publishers have been preparing for the deprecation of third-party cookies for years, many continue to rely on them, even as they test alternatives, experiment with their own first-party data offerings and see continued data leakage — which could be costing them revenue.

Data leakage can occur when users traverse the web, leaving a trail of demographic information, purchase history, location data, content consumption history and more signals across the websites they visit. Third-party cookies make data leakage possible by enabling parties who don't have a direct relationship with the user to build audience segments or misappropriate targeting data that the website owner may not have agreed to or known about. This not only negatively impacts user privacy but also harms publishers by allowing ad tech to reuse this data elsewhere without compensating the publisher at all.

The problem is widespread. In a new Digiday and Google Privacy Sandbox survey of 65 publishers, 94% of respondents reported that data leakage (unauthorized disclosure of first-party data on a third-party site) is a significant concern, with 38% saying it is “very significant” and more than half (56%) calling it a “somewhat significant” concern.

For publishers, the widespread, unauthorized disclosure of first-party data on third-party sites creates costly financial, reputational and operational challenges.

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The survey was conducted in paid partnership with Digiday and Privacy Sandbox.