A research study presented at the The 2019 Workshop on the Economics of Information Security in Boston this week, found that the revenue earned by publishers who use behavioral advertising cookies is only 4% higher than those who don’t. “Our findings so far suggest that when the user’s cookie is available, publisher’s revenue increases – but the increase is just about 4%. This corresponds to an average increase of $0.00008 per advertisement.”
As TechCrunch put it, “The lion’s share of value being created by digital advertising ends up in the coffers of adtech giants, Google and Facebook .” This study has important implications for online news sources and other web publications if it turns out that they’re affecting their visitor’s privacy without even gaining that much more revenue.
Here is an excerpt from the study’s abstract:
“While the impact of targeted advertising on advertisers’ campaign effectiveness has been vastly documented, much less is known about the value generated by online tracking and targeting technologies for publishers – the websites that sell ad spaces. In fact, the conventional wisdom that publishers benefit too from behaviorally targeted advertising has rarely been scrutinized in academic studies. We investigate how the (un)availability of users’ cookies, which affects the ability of advertisers to perform behavioral targeting, impacts publishers’ revenues …. This corresponds to an average increase of $0.00008 per advertisement. The results contribute to the current debate over online behavioral advertising, and how benefits accrued from tracking and targeting online consumers may be differentially allocated to various stakeholders in the advertising ecosystem.”