You know it was a busy day when a $6.5 billion acquisition is our number three item. Identity platform Okta just spent that much for Auth0, which offers similar capabilities but targets application developers. Forbes quoted Okta’s CEO as saying they are competing with Microsoft, Salesforce, and Zoom to be a “primary cloud”. Zoom?
Yesterday’s announcement that Google wouldn’t support individual-level alternatives to cookie-based identifiers shouldn’t have been a surprise. But this Lotame survey shows that 60% of U.S. senior decision makers still expect to target ads using multiple, interoperable ID solutions and 22% think just one will be enough. Only 44% think that publishers’ first-party data is a good replacement for third-party cookies and fewer 35% of marketers think contextual advertising will do the trick.
We also had a definitive announcement from Google that once it stops allowing third-party cookies in the Chrome browser, it also won’t accept similar-functioning replacements. Specifically, Google won’t build individual-level profiles based on browsing behavior. The move will favor publishers who collect huge stores of first party data, such as, well, Google.
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.