Category: In the News

Apple did not respond to requests for comment.

While many non-Apple browsers like Brave and Firefox already have built-in anti-tracking features, this new update also affects the world’s most popular browser, Google’s Chrome. While Apple is still working through some kinks that have allowed third-party cookies to work in some instances when the feature is switched on, all browsers on iOS and iPad OS will have ITP switched on by the end of the year.

Some 55.2% of Mac OS users are on Chrome, which has a 4.9% share of the iOS browser market, according to Netmarketshare. The vast majority, 93.1%, of iPhone users opt for Apple’s Safari, while 37.9% of Mac users browse the web on Apple’s browser. (Mac only has a 9.4% share of the desktop operating system market.) At present, ITP only affects Safari on MacOS, however in the next software version —Big Sur, expected at some point later this year — ITP will affect any iOS app, according to Cory Underwood, a platform engineer at data company Search Discovery.

As with all of Apple’s recent privacy updates, the latest ITP tightening is likely to negatively affect publisher revenue as they will have less information about visitors to their websites who use Apple devices. 

“The impact on a given publisher is dependent on how much share of each OS they have on their site,” said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer at Cafe Media. “These are all definitely data points that each publisher should understand about their audience so they can anticipate and measure the impact.”

CPMs for Safari users have fallen off by around 60% since ITP was introduced in 2017, according to ad tech firm Index Exchange.

Ad rates on Safari still haven’t improved some three years later, said Andrew Casale, Index Exchange CEO, who added that if Chrome performed similarly on Apple devices, CPMs would drop at the same level for that subset of users.

“Marketers are [still] spending their money and growing their budgets, but they’re just not spending it on the open web,” said Casale. “They’re taking that money and moving it into [walled gardens]. It’s scary when these changes happen: It’s not that money isn’t being spent — it’s being moved somewhere else.”

Later this year — at a so-far unspecified date — Apple is also expected to put the kibosh on a technique some publishers and ad tech companies used as an ITP workaround. Called CNAME cloaking, the technique was a way for vendors such as Criteo and Adobe to get around Apple treating them as third-party trackers. Instead, those vendors are afforded more persistent cookies that aren’t capped by ITP to a week.

In a hypothetical example, an ad tech company that does analytics — AnalyticsRUs — gets its advertiser client —AwesomeShoes—to add their company to its subdomain. So in this example, Analytics.AwesomeShoes.com would map to AnalyticsRUs and enable it to do cross-site tracking. (There are nonadvertising-related reasons why you’d want to use this CNAME technique. AwesomeShoes might want its blog site — blog.awesomeshoes.com — to map to awesomeshoes.wordpress.com, for example.)

As with Apple’s other privacy changes, there are potential negative consequences for publishers — and other companies who rely on web traffic, such as retailers. Those include, “a loss in accuracy regarding attribution, measurement, campaign performance and retention traffic statistics,” said Underwood. “Optimization platforms may resegment traffic more often, resulting in the same customer seeing multiple experiences.”

Antoine Bourlon, a research and development engineer at marketing measurement platform YRGLM predicts that vendors currently using CNAME will switch to other types of domain name systems that are harder to detect or use server-side programs to set more persistent cookies. 

But it’ll likely present another game of cat and mouse,

“This may work [for] one or two years until the lifetime of all cookies — except [those storing login information] — is limited by ITP,” said Bourlon. 

Cafe Media’s Bannister said if past history is anything to go by, it’s likely Apple will keep moving to restrict ad tracking mechanisms as it continues to set its agenda around privacy.

His advice to publishers: “Look at your numbers, understand what the differentials are for mobile Chrome versus Safari — but be vocal about the fact that this is worse for you: ‘This is hurting me as a publisher making great content’,” Bannister said.

Few consumer-facing virtual events are ticketed so the bulk of the revenue must come from advertising. And as events in previous years served as significant revenue drivers for publishers like The Atlantic and Time, the hot metric for virtual events is scale, as more eyeballs equals more revenue dollars.

Scale “matters when making a media buy,” according to Barry Lowenthal, CEO of media agency the MediaKitchen, adding that celebrity appearances help to achieve that.

The first Time 100 Talk was likely one of the only times that audiences could hear from Dr. Fauci, singer John Legend, actor and activist Angelina Jolie and Senator Amy Klobuchar in one sitting. Yet, the virtual program covering the theme of finding hope in the pandemic was able to pull all of those figures together in a two-hour span.

“If you look at other virtual events, they tend to be siloed by industry or sector,” said Time executive editor Dan Macsai. “What we do every week in Time 100 Talks is spotlight conversations with people from multiple different industries. There is always something for everyone and we’ve found that is the best way to attract a large audience.”

The first 27 episodes of the Time100 Talks — Time’s virtual replacement for the Time 100 Summit that was expanded into a weekly show — have brought in a total of 75,000 registrants, said chief revenue officer Viktoria Degtar, and averages 5 million views per episode.

That series is now a mid-seven figure business for the publisher, and has since drawn nine advertisers, including P&G, State Farm and Citi, Degtar added.

But Lowenthal said it’s still hard to predict the draw that any one celebrity will have on an audience. Therefore, in conversations with publishers, he said his team always talks about the strategy for driving viewers to the events, including encouraging the celebrities to promote the events on their own social media channels.

“It also gives us confidence if the talent promotes it,” Lowenthal said. “It feels like the right endorsement from the celebrity that they want to be involved and they are invested in the event.” 

However, “none of this is celebrity for celebrity’s sake,” said Aretae Wyler, chief operating officer of The Atlantic.

Wyler added that while Chris Evans is a major figure in Hollywood, the reason for his participation is more about his passion for civic engagement and encouraging people to vote.

The virtual version of the Atlantic Festival has 13 sponsors on board, compared to last year’s 16, all of which are supporting its evening, 90-minute-long main stage programming that has the bulk of the headliners. The company declined to disclose sponsorship rates for the event, but 12 of the advertisers are also sponsoring some of the daytime programming, that is expected to have a smaller crowd, but is more topical in nature and features subject experts, Wyler said.

Talent “is a positive draw, but context, connection and content is key to make a meaningful connection with the audience,” said Jenna Fidellow, svp of content and partnerships at Havas Media. Meaning the talent has to have a legitimate connection to the event so that they are adding value to the content, as well as adding a “sizzly” perspective for the audience, she said.

“Part of evaluating coming in as a sponsor to an event absolutely includes who the featured talent or speakers will be,” Fidellow said.