I thought I saw a headline last week about Google wanting to get rid of cookies. Not sure how they would do that unless they would exclude sites that use cookies from search results, forcing websites to give them up.
If true wouldn’t that destroy the whole affiliate business model? Otherwise how would anyone make money from promoting porn or anything else?
Not seen anything myself, so many sites use it though not just porn. Pretty much every site does, so getting rid of that is only possible if they come up with something new to store information temporarily.
There’s been a lot of discussion about this in the tech and advertising press. So let me clarifyâ¦
First, no one is talking about deleting first party cookies. So the cookies you set, are still fine.
What they’re talking about is not allowing 3rd party cookies. So Google Analytics won’t be able to set a cookie for .google.com, but it will be able to set a cookie for .yourdomain.com. That means Google Analytics won’t be able to track users as they go from site to site (at least not by default â there are things you can do to track across a limited number of sites).
Third party cookies will only be allowed when the user interacts with the 3rd party content. So if you have a video in an iframe and the user interacts with the video, then the cookie from the iframe domain can be set.
The purpose of this is to stop the trackers that are used by advertisers. So no more ads on site X for a product you recently put into your shopping cart on site Y. It also limits the usefulness of social media trackers.
It’s important to note that Apple has done this with all versions of Safari for a while now to the point that iPhone/iPad traffic is worth a lot less than Android traffic to advertisers despite iOS users having higher net worths. And Firefox made this the default behavior a few months ago. Google is finally doing it with Chrome because of criticism by privacy advocates. They’ve delayed as long as they could because it will have a big impact on their revenues from Adwords.
For those of us in porn (affiliates and sponsors), it will probably only affect cookie stuffing. So for example I use prefetch and prerender to set cookies for the sponsor site when the entire page being viewed by my visitor is dedicated to the one sponsor site. That way if the user then goes off to the sponsor’s site and buys, and I was the last one to “touch” them, then I get credit for the sale even though they didn’t follow one of my links. (Back in the day I checked with a lot of sponsors and all of them were fine with me doing this). Anyway, that will probably break. It used to be that cookie stuffing was about 1/3rd of my revenue. Now it’s down to ~15%. With Chrome being ~70% of the market (minus some users already blocking 3rd party cookies and using private browsing windows and prefetch not being supported by all browsers) that makes sense. So I expect this will cost me around 15% of my revenue. I’ll need to be a lot more obnoxious about call to action links to compensate.
Thank you for the explanation jay, I did not know that.
Yes, thank you Jay!