How Raptive is preparing you for the cookieless future

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It is the best of times…

Creators and independent publishers are the small business owners who power the internet, but there’s nothing small about your collective influence. Together, your websites are the internet’s largest source of online ads, bringing in hundreds of millions of visits each month. 

and it is the worst of times. 

With Google eliminating third-party cookies from Chrome and generative AI poised to disrupt everything, creators need to juggle more than ever to remain competitive. 

Charles Dickens probably wasn’t talking about third-party cookies, identity, and privacy, but he could have been.

What’s the state of third-party cookies today? 

With third-party cookies officially on the way out, we’re facing a pivotal moment in the creator industry. In 2020, Google announced their plan to discontinue support for third-party cookies from 2022, but delayed several times due to challenges in replacing third-party cookie functionality. 

On January 4, 2024, Chrome deprecated 1% of third-party cookies, which means it stopped supporting third-party cookies on 1% of browsers. In April 2024, Google announced another delay, extending full deprecation of cookies from the end of 2024 to early 2025. 

We were early testers and the first to share data from the 1% deprecation—here’s where things stand:

  • Chrome with third-party cookies: 100% of current monetization
  • Chrome without third-party cookies: 70% of current monetization
  • Safari (previously eliminated third-party cookies): ~50% of Chrome with third-party cookies

The future of advertising is a patchwork quilt of solutions

It’s more crucial than ever to prepare for the future with a trusted partner and advocate by your side. We have a team of 350+ experts here to help you navigate these epic changes and come out on top, no matter what comes. 

As industry leaders, we’re making sure you’re represented in huge industry shifts. Raptive team members have seats at the most important tables where adtech decisions are made: 

Our involvement with these organizations ensures your voices are heard and provides vital insight as we develop strategies for the future. 

One thing we know for sure—there’s no silver bullet for the future of advertising. It will be a patchwork quilt of solutions. 

We’re focused on three key strategies:

1. Maximize your email-identified visitors

Email-identified visitors are a powerful piece of the cookieless future, and Raptive’s email identity solution helps you get them. Our solution works within the ecosystem of subscription tools you’re already using—creators and email experts are coming up with innovative tools, and our solution works with all of them. 

We’re also helping you get the most email subscribers and get them identified for maximum traffic and revenue benefits. Slickstream provides you with an out-of-the-box solution for growing email subscribers and IDs. Convert those existing subscribers into identified visitors with Raptive’s Newsletter Link ID, which on average leads to a 43% higher CPM and 2-3x more identified readers. 

Our dedicated Email Solutions team supports you with different offerings at each creator level, designed to help you bring subscribers back to your site and benefit from higher ad spending. From strategy, support, and custom implementation to check-ins, audits, and best practices, we’re providing a range of resources for creators.

2. Leverage best-in-class identity technology

We’re leveraging the Raptive network’s strength to help advertisers reach the right readers on your site, bringing you the most earnings while prioritizing privacy. 

Our Identity Graph technology means all Raptive sites benefit from a pool of authenticated traffic, without requiring readers to log in on individual sites. This is just one piece of the identity puzzle—what works today may not be what works in the future. 

We’re exploring new solutions like ID Bridging, which helps you make more from visits even when they’re not in the Raptive network’s pool of authenticated traffic. Identity technology evolves quickly, and we’re experimenting to be sure we’re always implementing the best possible combination of solutions. 

This includes working closely with Google to shape new privacy-forward identity solutions for the industry, including the Protected Audience API (PA API). 

What is PA API?

Protected Audience API (PA API) is part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, a group of solutions to replace third-party cookie functionality. We’re partnering with Google on the Privacy Sandbox, and Raptive creators were the first to earn from PA API auctions. 

PA API is Google’s auction to help advertisers target without third-party cookies. It’s completely new infrastructure and we’re working to educate the industry and leading ad-tech partners to encourage integration, as greater scale leads to better targeting for advertisers. 

PA API’s final form will depend on the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority, which has not yet given approval for Google to fully deprecate third-party cookies. 

3. Drive unique demand with direct sales and PMPs

Even with third-party cookies going away, advertisers will still have budgets to spend. We’re tapping into that spend in new ways that drive higher RPMs, like Private Marketplaces (PMP) and direct sales. Unique demand is more important than ever, and our 40-person award-winning sales team is selling custom programs that benefit all creators. 

We’re also positioning you in front of the world’s biggest advertisers at critical industry events like IAB Newfronts, Cannes Lions, Digiday Publishing Summit, and more. These events are a huge opportunity to show brands what they stand to gain by working with creators, and why Raptive creators are the best of the best. 

Finally, we’re continuing to use contextual data to enable ad targeting without third-party cookies—something we’ve been doing for years. Our proprietary machine-learning system targets a reader’s mindset and behavior, giving us privacy-conscious data that advertisers value. 

We’re coming up with creative ways to preserve privacy and RPMs by diversifying our partnerships, technology, and solutions while maintaining the high quality the Raptive network is known for. And judging by the strong RPMs we’re seeing, our strategies are working. 

Third-party cookies are going away. Rather than look to the past, we’re working to replace them with something better and encouraging the entire industry to get on board. Privacy is the future, and privacy-forward solutions are the only solutions.

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