On this week&#x27;s episode of the podcast, I am joined by Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi, professors at Boston University who have co-authored a paper titled &quot;Can privacy technologies replace cookies? Ad revenue in a field experiment.&quot; The paper quantifies the impact of Google&#x27;s Privacy Sandbox on publisher revenue, user experience, and market competition through a field experiment conducted in collaboration with Raptive, a digital advertising management platform. Our conversation highlights the specific challenges faced by the digital advertising ecosystem as it moves away from traditional identifiers and toward a new, more restrictive privacy regime. Among other things, we discuss: How the loss of third-party cookies specifically affects regional markets with stricter privacy regulations like the European Union If the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies like the Privacy Sandbox could truly bridge the revenue gap created by the deprecation of cookies What role browser vendors should play in establishing technical guarantees that satisfy both regulators and advertising stakeholders Why the industry tends to respond to identity restrictions by developing more complex identifiers instead of contextual alternatives When the concentration of traffic toward larger platforms will reach a tipping point for small-scale content creators How the removal of personalization features on platforms like YouTube serves as a blueprint for future privacy-driven market shifts We also cover another paper by Garrett Johnson, &quot;COPPAcalypse? The Youtube Settlement&#x27;s Impact on Kids Content.&quot; Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast: ⁠⁠INCRMNTAL⁠⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on. Xsolla⁠. With the Xsolla Web Shop, you can create a direct storefront, cut fees down to as low as 5%, and keep players engaged with bundles, rewards, and analytics. ⁠Branch⁠. Branch is an AI-powered MMP, connecting every paid, owned, and organic touchpoint so growth teams can see exactly where to put their dollars to bring users in the door and keep them coming back Interested in sponsoring the Mobile Dev Memo podcast? Contact Mobile Dev Memo advertising. The Mobile Dev Memo podcast is available on: Spotify YouTube Apple Podcasts

Season 7, Episode 22: Quantifying the advertising value of cookies (with Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi)

Mobile Dev Memo Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Mobile Dev Memo Podcast

## Participants

- **Eric Sufert** (Mobile Dev Memo)
- **Garrett Johnson** (Boston University)
- **Shunto Kobayashi** (Boston University)

## Transcript

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N-C-R-M-N-T-A-L.com. Or click the link in the show description. The problem is that the distinction needs to be drawn between the competence of the economists and the correctness of their analysis. Welcome to the Mobile Dev Memo Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Sufert. And I'm joined today by Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi. Shunto and Garrett, welcome to the podcast. Hey there, Harvard man.

Oh, well, hey. Hey. Congratulations on your recent graduation of Harvard's Master's of Data Science. Yeah, well, Master's of Applied Computation and then the Data Science is like the specialization, yeah. Well, congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you. It's funny because I follow the SEAS School of Engineering and Applied Sciences on LinkedIn. And they have these profiles of all of my classmates. You know, it's like so-and-so is now, you know, someone's moving to Amazon. I saw someone's moving to Palantir.

I just thought it would be funny if they had a profile on me like, and Eric Sufert, who just recently graduated, will continue to write a blog and run a podcast. Yeah. Well, yeah, the treatment effect may not be huge here, but you learned a lot. Yeah, right. Yeah, the increase in wage, zero. Okay, it's really nice to have you both on. So, you both co-authored a paper, which was published recently, but I guess the preprint is like a year old. Is that right? Something like that, yeah.

The paper's fantastic. I think I'm going to link to it in the show notes. Everyone should read it. But the paper's titled, Can Privacy Technologies Replace Cookies? And I want to dive into what you found and the methodology. But I think before we get to that, maybe you can give like a little bit of a refresher or just an education about the specific topic, which was the privacy sandbox. So give me some background on the privacy sandbox, the actual experiment, and then explain like how you acquired this data.

Like what was the providence of the data that you used in the paper? And also, please introduce yourselves as you do so. I'm Shunto Kobayashi. I'm an assistant professor of marketing at Boston University. I'm an economist by training....

Season 7, Episode 22: Quantifying the advertising value of cookies (with Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi)

Transcript

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Season 7, Episode 22: Quantifying the advertising value of cookies (with Garrett Johnson and Shunto Kobayashi)

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.