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When Google announced its intention to stop supporting third-party cookies for ads, to move away from tracking users based on their individual browsing history to creating personalized ads, it was like a nuclear bomb for the company. online advertising industry. Yesterday, Google began officially testing its alternative solution, FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), which anonymously serves ads to groups based on similar behavior. The biggest problem for the advertising industry? FLoC is entirely a creation of Google, so the company doesn’t really compete in the field. A group of online advertisers therefore offers an alternative (with a suitably cute name), SWAN, Bloomberg reports.
Developed by advertising technology companies PubMatic, OpenX and Zeta Global, SWAN aims to give people more control over how their online data is used. They will be prompted to accept the ads on their first visit to a site in the SWAN network and will have the option to activate personalized ads with individual tracking. Bloomberg notes that there will be other options for managing their ad data, but it’s unclear how that will compare to Google’s anonymized FLoC technology. Once you have configured your settings within the SWAN network, they will be shared across supported sites. You will also be able to change your preferences over the network at any site.
At first glance, SWAN seems more like a desperate way to preserve the glory days of targeted online advertising, rather than a real step towards a more anonymous browsing experience. It’s more of a response to Google’s FLoC than a true consumer-friendly initiative. But of course Google’s motivation is also suspect; we argued that he is essentially trying to control himself before government regulators impose more restrictive rules.
See our current moment as a point of transition in the online advertising industry. With the move away from third-party cookies, everyone will have to find ways to serve ads that also respect user data privacy. FLoC and SWAN are two solutions, but we will certainly see other alternatives emerge as well. Given the size of Google’s influence in the online advertising space, however, it will be much more difficult for competitors to come together for their own solutions.
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