This article is part 20 of the "21 Thoughts on Video Streaming in 2021"-series.

Krishna Rao Vijayanagar (Founder at OTTVerse) shares his 2021 thoughts on Ad Tech.

The second thing that I am eagerly tracking is how the Ad Industry will evolve with the phasing out of 3rd party cookies. How will this impact data collection, data quality, and advertisers' ability to target prospective customers?

My take

Companies like Firefox and Apple are going all-in on privacy to protect their users. Firefox even owns https://trackthis.link/ which is a website tool which opens 100 random websites to confuse trackers.

Screenshot of Firefox's "Track This"

While this is applaudable, it does give the ad industry less ammo to tailor ads.

Should we care about this?

Yes, but with certain duality.

  1. Privacy is important. There's no question about it.
  2. If "less-than-ideal-ad-personalization" implies that less viewers will click ads, then the profitability of ad revenue goes down, which means that ad-supported businesses become less profitable – potentially even going bankrupt. (And, yes, that includes ad-supported streaming services.)

🤷‍♂️