Recently Apple announced it is adding a tracker blocker to its Safari web browser that prevents advertisers and publishers from tracking users’ browsing activity (through cookies, etc). The new feature is called “intelligent tracking prevention” and for now is reportedly only coming to desktop Safari browsers. That said, this is largely a following of Google’s reported roll out of tracker blocking in the Chrome browser across desktop and mobile (reportedly coming early 2018).
According to Morgan Stanley, these changes could impact as much as 40% of the US Online Ad Market.
Morgan Stanley estimates that Safari and Chrome based display advertising makes up ~$28bn, or ~40% of the US online ad market.
This, along side GDPR, set to become law in less than 1 year (and will inevitably set the gold standard globally) will have major implications for digital advertising and the existing ad tech ecosystem built up over the last decade.
Winners:
You – the user
Less malware, no surveillance and better ads, if one chooses to accept them.
The Brave browser and the in-built Basic Attention Token rewards users monetarily for their attention – amazing!
Publishers
They have a direct customer relationships which are required in order to solicit consent from individuals to collect data.
Expect Facebook and Google to benefit the most here as they are fully vertically integrated. Facebook and Google between them also own 9 of the top 15 mobile apps.
While there could be some near-term disruption, over the long-term these changes only put a higher value on large app platforms with data around their unique, logged-in and engaged user base – Snap, Twitter and Pinterest to name a few.
Advertisers are also likely to embrace other engaged audience bases, such as mobile gaming, which would be positive for companies such as King (~340M monthly active users spending ~35 minutes/daily user/day).
Expect Amazon to be a winner also with increased advertiser testing, as well as Linked In.
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