Sincera is a media telemetry service providing unique data on the digital advertising ecosystem. As of March 1st, Sincera has transitioned to Methodology 2.0, which offers a more accurate representation of identifier configuration and deployment within the digital advertising industry. This data is collected by monitoring over 200,000+ of the internet's most popular properties.

Changes in Methodology 2.0 include:

• Axis Definition: The chart now counts the number of publishers using the identifier, providing a more accurate measure of an identifier's footprint.
• Direct Implementation: Detection and counts for identifiers independently deployed by publishers outside of a header bidding environment are now included.
• Header Wrapper Detection: Detection and identifier counts for the Zeus header wrapper, alongside Prebid and IX Library, are now included.
• Identifier Normalization: Identifiers known as different values across environments are normalized to support a single count for the identifier.
• Publisher De-Duplication: Duplicative counts for an identifier on a single publisher are removed. Regardless of the number of different implementations a publisher has of an identifier, it is never counted more than once.

Sincera also tracks the identifier absorption rate, which shows the percentage of time an identifier is absorbed into outbound bid requests versus the times it is available for pickup and ingestion into a bid stream.

Sincera offers a free account granting unlimited access to industry-wide data and insights. The service enables users to increase their customer base, research competitors, grow market share, and build next-generation ad products with Sincera's unique signal data.

Expert Perspective:

A recent randomized experiment in Google Chrome reveals that prices are 31% lower with Google's new ad targeting (Sandbox) compared to the existing behavioural targeting based on cookies. This is a slight improvement over cookieless ads without any targeting, which saw a 34% decrease.

These are preliminary findings, with many publishers and ad-tech companies still testing Sandbox technologies.

Comparing these results with other studies on the impact of disappearing cookies on revenue/prices:

• Marotta et al 2019 reported a 4% decrease in publisher revenue
• Johnson et al 2020 found a 52% decline in ad exchange revenue
• Wang et al 2024 noted a 6% decrease in publisher revenue (click based)
• Laub et al 2024 reported 18/23% decrease in prices of sellers in ad exchange

The results show a wide range of losses from 4-52%. The most recent study (Laub et al 2024) indicates that revenue losses also vary significantly depending on the type of content provider, with non-premium publishers experiencing greater losses.

🥇 Contributor: Nico Neumann