Meanwhile, advertisers continue to struggle to adjust to a world without third party cookies. Marketing research agency Kantar has just announced Project Moonshot, which will marry digital publisher data on who saw which ads with behavior data from Kantar’s 100 million-member consumer panel. Partners include Google, Pandora, Dish, Pinterst, Roku, Snap, Spotify and Twitter.
I know this sounds crazy, but what if all those third-party cookies we’re so worried about losing don’t really make advertising more effective? Privacy-friendly browser Brave and Dutch publisher NPO found just that: ad revenues rose sharply when they switched from people-based to contextual targeting. Without a proper control, we don’t know if the switch to contextual was the real reason for the change, but it’s still an intriguing thought.
An unknown hacker has been finding unsecured online databases and replacing their contents with the word “Meow”. Cute, except that no one knows if the hacker is stealing the data first. He or she has now hit more than 1,500 databases, a reminder that poor security is common and motivator for data owners to improve it.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.