Amazon offers publishers a Plan B as the crooked cookie crumbles

An alternative emerges as the web waves goodbye to the spyware that sent CPMs tumbling, agencies to the wall, and broke the user experience

Cookies are going away. It’s been creeping up for four years, and whenever I raise it with publishers, it sparks a wave of indignant emotion, whether I’m talking to sales, editorial, or engineering.

For ad sales and ad tech, they are losing their most effective tool to target ads and maintain yield, and that’s terrifying.

They are right.

Today, the Financial Times reported: “Almost all internet users will become close to unidentifiable. The risk for publishers is advertising becomes much less valuable.”

Shufty over to editorial and they tell me cookies are spyware enforced by ad networks to stalk users and steal first party publisher data for their own gain.

They are right.

While I was at Fairfax Media, an analytics company stole our data by hiding cookies in ads then tried to sell it back to us, threatening to sell it to our rivals if we refused.

Engineering warned that millions of unaudited third-party code snippets on pages was unthinkable, as it would create hacking risks and slow art…