The Weekly Bulletin | July 23, 2024

Hi SODP community,

Let’s recap on what’s been happening, the new content, industry updates, tips, and more.

TIP OF THE WEEK

Three delays later, Google said “Never mind!” and reversed its plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome.

Instead, Google promised to introduce a “new experience” in Chrome that will give users a choice on the level web browsing privacy. Though Google hasn’t revealed any timelines.

Every major and niche media outlet has reported on the news.

But the main question is: what does that mean for publishers?

My personal takeaway is that the big picture doesn’t really change.

Google merely came to the painful conclusion that there is no one single method to rule them all when it comes to killing off third-party tracking. The Privacy Sanbox method received widespread criticism. There is the Apple’s method of giving people the option on Safari to opt in or out of cookies tracking.

So while Google is pivoting its approach, the reality is that increasingly, the emphasis will be on first-party data. Whether through Google’s “new experience” or sandboxing or any other method, publishers’ revenue will be impacted. The decline might just be not quite as dramatic as we anticipated.

And in order to earn the audience, publishers will still need to re-evaluate their data strategy and identify best practices that will allow them to collect first-party data.

Additionally, Google’s reversal on cookies deprecation opens doors adtech and pubtech solutions providing more native integrations for Chrome, which, in turn, will lead to a more inclusive web that will help publishers provide a better user experience.

LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER

SODP POSTS

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Taption Review for 2024

AI has transformed the age-old transcription industry for good. Advanced speech-based natural language processing (NLP) now enables software to transcribe human voice with near human-level accuracy while taking only a fraction of the time of an expert human transcriber.

However, there still remains a large gap between promise and delivery. Several AI-based transcription tools available today are either too slow, too inaccurate, or simply don’t work as well for non-European languages.

Taption’s AI transcription service claims to plug these gaps in the AI transcription space. Join us as we review this tool to see how well it lives up to its promise.

READ MORE

8 First-Party Data Strategies for Digital Publishers

When developing sustainable first-party strategies, it is important that publishers define their approach – how they are going to build the foundation of their first-party data.

It involves three key steps:

• Data Collection

• Data Consolidation: Publishers should strive to unify the collected data on a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to create a complete, coherent view of each user in their database.

• Execution

READ MORE

JOB BOARD

➡️ Australian Football League is looking for a vertical content editor to create and publish vertical content to the AFL Live app (Melbourne, VIC, Australia). SEE MORE

➡️ Dow Jones is seeking an audience development manager, partnerships to join its performance marketing team, driving the organic reach of Dow Jones media properties, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch (NYC, NY, US). SEE MORE

COMMUNITY BUZZ

Industry News

➡️ Americans are more satisfied with Google Search than a year ago, according to the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Search and Social Media Study 2024. READ MORE

➡️ Google has been quietly renewing media deals with a number of smaller publishers in Australia – but with a caveat. READ MORE

Social Media Discussions

➡️ Khalil A. Cassimally on LinkedIn:

You feel like you should probably experiment or do more with generative AI. But you're not pulling the trigger because there are so many risks … Here's a matrix that can help newsrooms navigate the AI risk quagmire.

The use cases shown go beyond the scope of most media organisations. But the categories (customer journeys, concision, coding, creative content) all apply to us.

Matrix from McKinsey.

CONTINUE READING HERE

These are the highlights for the last week.

Until next!

Vahe Arabian and the editorial team at SODP