Hello and welcome everyone back to another episode of the Publisher Lab
I am Tyler Bishop and this is another episode where I'll be breaking down the news and information
in the world of publishing and on the web with everybody that's listening and for a
short reprise here and there, our producer Manny here will pop in
Hey everybody. Welcome back Manny and welcome back everyone. And Manny does a great job of curating a lot of the stories for the show behind the scenes
and so often times he's got unique insights on some of this stuff that, yeah, maybe I don't
So it's been nice to kind of have the man behind the mirror, or the man, what do they
say in The Wizard of Oz? The man behind the... Behind the curtain? Yeah, behind the curtain
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to say masked for some reason, but no, that doesn't make any sense at all
I think that's rough. Maybe, maybe. I'm sure we've got some wrestling fans that listen to the show
So I guess one of the things we've been doing is we've been kind of breaking down the stories
unofficially into kind of different categories. It seems to just be the sort of bulk of what the news and information that really affects
the world of publishing is sort of like, you can kind of put them into these different
buckets and yeah. So we kind of look at it like AI, Google, and then sort of like the larger sort of industry
social, everything else that affects publishers and we won't be hard and rigid on that necessarily
but I think it helps us make sure that the best and brightest information, if I can say
it that way, makes its way to you and makes its way onto the show
So first up, what else would it be other than AI? So this week in the world of AI, in terms of what's affecting our web publishers, is
Microsoft Bing is struggling to gain market share despite AI enhancement. And we've got another story on why AI, art in particular, cannot be copyrighted and that's
something that we've talked about on the show before. Actually, both of these topics really
I would say that, like we said at the start of this year on the show, this is going to
be a space that evolves a lot and very quickly. I would liken it to something like email back in the early 2000s or late 90s where it was
kind of the revelation, but if you look at it now, especially in the context of something
like a modern Gmail, it looks so different and there's so many sort of protocols and
just sort of like wide sweeping user behavior and sort of prominent software related enhancements
and things like that that have come along the way that you can barely recognize it from
the earliest forms of something like a Microsoft Outlook. And I don't think that AI is going to be much different and you can kind of see this here
with Microsoft is, you know, the sort of like storyline or I guess narrative that Google
was going to disappear and Microsoft was going to quickly take their place because
of AI that, you know, there was at least a little bit of momentum there
I think you could argue. I was a bit skeptical, although I was like, hey, Bing's having their moment
I do think that Bing is definitely in the mindsphere of the people that listen to this show
My wife, for example, however, it's like Bing is still the same Bing to her
I do think that that's probably the majority of international and US based like users
And I think that that's one of the reasons why despite the AI powered enhancements that
Bing's market share, Bing's market share remains pretty much unchanged. Bing's US market share was 6.47% in July, a slight increase in February and Microsoft
has just reached third party data claiming more users actually are going directly to Bing's chat page
And then Microsoft's VP of, actually search engine VP, notice and suggest internal data
shows that Bing is taking more market share from data. So Yousif Mehdi is actually the gentleman who claims that they are actually taking some
market share from Google. So one of the things to realize about when they do make these claims, it would be easy
to say, well, they say that they're taking market share, but all the public information
that's out there doesn't seem to suggest much of a difference. They are a public company and it is something to where they could have a shareholder lawsuit
levied against them or something along those lines if they actually didn't have some kind
of data to suggest that. Whether that's bias, I'm sure that it is
But in some ways I do sort of buy the concept that they have going a very, what I would
say is not something that Google is losing sweep over amounts of market share from them
Producer Nanny, have you found yourself using Bing more than Google or have you made the switch
Have you tried it at all? I haven't tried it at all. Since you've been doing the podcast all year, it's been something that I remember we talked
about a few months ago. I was like, oh, that's cool that Bing is actually getting a lot more praise
Go to them, right? Like Cat UTC or even Google's AI. And then I just stuck with Cat UTC and got excited about Google's AI
I think that just sort of shows how dominant in the space Google really is
Just on the sheer name alone, people are like, I'm not going to jump over to the other thing. Yeah
And I kind of wonder if Cat UTC's innovations and improvements that they've made are, well
number one, I bet that Cat UTC is eating into more market share than Bing is
And on top of that, I would bet that Cat UTC, the one that is disrupting Google and the
one that Microsoft has a partnership with, I bet that they're probably like a greater
headwind to Bing and to Microsoft than Google is an incumbent. They are seeing increased usage in chat, though
This is according to the SEO Roundtable. Despite stagnant market share, Bing chat usage has surged in recent weeks
Microsoft acknowledges server issues due to increased Bing chat usage. And a major infrastructure upgrade is anticipated to accommodate the growing demand
I will buy that, that the people that are using Bing more are likely using sort of like
their AI-based chat. To me, it would signal – and this is just me, industry, inside baseball – that if
I was Bing, I would spend the majority of my time then saying we're not a search engine
and I'd be putting most of my time and energy into being somebody that is creating something
innovative and new. This chat is obviously what's driving new users to your platform
Bing is a search engine. Let's be honest, they have a small amount of market share in that space, which for anybody
not named Microsoft would be a boom. You'd just be so thrilled
Even if it was this very tiny piece of that market, it's worth a lot
But for Microsoft, it's a drop in the bucket. So I think that the real opportunity here is to provide something that Cat UTC doesn't
They are integrated in Cat UTC. You can use it with Bing, although they've paused that to some degree because they are
trying to navigate the legal consequences of doing it. So I do think it'll be interesting to see here, but I would say as a publisher, if you
were pivoting towards a strategy in which you were trying to basically figure out how
do you make content that Bing is going to find or turn up in the chat, I would say I
don't know that it's worth the time and the energy now. There might have been enough there to just maybe start getting ahead of it a few months
ago, but now I would look at it more so as if you want to spend your time on how do I
make my content ready for something other than a search engine, I'd spend my time on
Cat UTC and rich markup-based forms of populating content on the web
Which in most cases, I think a lot of publishers aren't doing enough to them, actually have
available to them. If you use WordPress, you can go to, I think it's wp-rest or dash json on your site
Your site URL slash wp-json or rest, I can't remember, and then it's slash json
So I think it's wp-, sorry everybody. It's wp- for those that are writing this down
So wp-rest slash json slash v2 slash post question mark and then hit enter and I think
you'll see a little bit more about what I'm talking about. I'll make sure to include that in the description too
Yeah, this is for those that didn't just have a pen and pencil out, which it's the worst
thing ever whenever somebody gives you a print and they have like the along URL on there
Whoever made this was super disconnected from everything because yeah, who is going to verbatim
type in a very long URL, especially if you've got a lot of letters and numbers anyway
I mean how bad do you want to go to that webpage, right? I know, really
And usually it's like a sales one-sheeter or something like that and I'd rather die
So that kind of bridges this really well into this discussion that we've had before on the
podcast about AI art and can it be copyrighted? And you'll remember at the start of this year there was the lawsuit in which artists were
alleging that a patent PPT agent trained on their stock photos is essentially stealing
their content or stealing their rights to their imagery and stuff like that
And this has become a bigger question because the same thing could be said and we talked
about this a few weeks ago with a TV show. If AI can write an entire season of Friends, what do you need writers for
But at the same time, it could write a whole season of Friends because you have the source
material, it knows all the other seasons of Friends. Sorry, I didn't watch the show
Some people, it's not my thing, but my example, I would guess that Friends had like
almost ten seasons or a dozen seasons, I don't know. But that's a lot of material to basically kind of get an idea of the plot points and
things like that. I had to write a children's book for one of my nieces when they were just in town and
it did a great job. And I did it mainly just so that I could give the characters the name of my dogs and
different people and family members that they knew and it made it fun for them
And it did a great job. I mean, you could go pull any children's book off the shelf at a book store and I'm
confident that it would be indistinguishable from the one that it wrote
And I would say the same could be said for Friends. And the only reason it can write a children's book is because it has all the other ones
to use as source material. And so the same can be, you can apply this to music and other forms of content
And producing manias, when you think about the things that you do and produce, I mean
even this very show, at what point do you go, hey, if somebody starts creating a deep
fake of me and a deep fake of you, God forbid, and then they've listened to the show
enough, they curate the news, they plug it in there. Outside the realm of possibility, you could just create an AI version of our show each week
At what point do you feel like that would be stealing? I mean, that's really the question here, right
The wording that the court used was artwork created solely by artificial intelligence
without human input. So what do you define as human input? If we're not on the show but I'm editing the show every week, is that okay
If you have AI characters for us, or is it something where I still have to research the
stories and then AI takes care of everything else, is that enough
So where do we draw this line? And if you think about it, my likeness, a deep fake of me, promoting that it is me
assumingly, that seems like, especially when it comes to identity, that's a line that gets crossed
If they call this show the publisher lab, that seems like something that we could obviously
copyright the show or register a trademark or something. So that's a line that can get crossed
But your point about there's this area where AI can be something that we haven't been able
to do before, which is it can rip off something to a near identical quality
Whereas before, it's like you have Mad TV and you have Saturday Night Live
Yeah, it's the same concept, but they're different shows and you know the difference
And you can just say, well, it's essentially they're doing the same thing, but you can't
copyright a sketch comedy television show. You can't copyright a podcast about industry, web industry and publishing
But the second that you start kind of wondering where's the parody at, where it's like that
is clearly a deep fake of me. That is, they call it the publisher fab or something like that
Don't do that, please. But the thing that I think about with it is that the case that they're talking about right
now is this idea of artwork that's generated without human input, like you said
And to me, there's no such thing. That's like a computer that has no software on it, that has no operating system
It's just hardware. It just fits there. You can kind of think of AI as like this digital ether-based hardware where you have all these
different, even the models themselves, realistically, it's like the models are based on training
data that comes from people. So there's no such thing as an AI without human input
If you could have that, it would be very strange and interesting
You can think of machine learning and the machine learning systems that are basically
the underlying powers of most of the AI that we are using today
That's just a machine that has the ability to take information, write an algorithm based
on sort of like a goal or a general direction, and then it uses that information to rewrite
its own algorithm over and over again in the same way that a brain does
That's like saying a child is only able to learn without any input from the world
Humans are the input and we're sort of like the mechanisms in which the machines are able
to interact with the physical world. But yeah, we go down to more of an esoteric sort of like discussion, I think, after that
But yeah, we'll keep our eyes on it. I mean, it's not a topic that I want to have to try to navigate personally, so I feel for
the people that are having to make those decisions. That said, I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that the wrong decisions will
get made, but we'll see. Moving on to sort of like the other category that seems to dominate a lot of the news and
discussion on the shows, our good friends at Google. Google was accused recently of collecting children's data for advertising
And YouTube, correlatingly, maybe, perhaps, you can imagine, has partnered with the UMG
for Responsible AI Development. And so what this means is, so Google is finding themselves now in a similar position that
Facebook did a while back, and then also Epic Games, who I believe is the creator and the
developer behind Fortnite, which is a popular online game. And this is a very hard problem
We're hard on Google on this show, and I've said this before, I know a lot of folks over
there, and there's very smart people working on really good products, and we probably give
them a hard time probably more than we should, but they play a very prominent role in our
space and have done so on their own accord, and so I think they deserve maybe a little
bit more scrutiny than everyone else. But in this case, there's a lot of challenges in sort of overcoming the, I guess, the allegations
levied against them here. So Google is accused of serving targeted ads to children and collecting their data
This potentially violates the 2019 settlement with the SEC over COPPA violations, COPPA
AdAlytics claims that YouTube shows personalized ads on videos marked, Made for Kids
So if you ever uploaded a video to YouTube, there's a little setting there as you're uploading
and providing information about the title, the description that says, Is this made for kids
And if you said yes, supposedly, and the way that it was supposed to work, and you could
assume even, YouTube is going to both show those videos and also the ads on those videos
differently or treat them differently than they would videos that are not made for kids
I suppose, even though it's like it's a title of Made for Kids or just something else
Which is a weird bucket. I always thought it was a weird phrasing. But Google denies any wrongdoing and emphasizes that their protection of children is a top priority
So this is a hard problem because it's very hard to authenticate age on the Internet
It just is. And I guess the caveat that you get here is that they're showing personalized ads on videos
made for kids. And I have to be more, Manny, are you familiar at all with the settlement and the FTC TAPA case
and what they had agreed to or what the settlement actually like was
I think the settlement was that they made a promise. That's how it was worded in the articles
They made a promise that they would not collect data from kids. Gotcha
And that it seems through a third party investigation that they are definitely collecting data
And because of that, people are now scrutinizing Google for that. Yeah, this is a classic Cambridge Analytica style case, although the scandal is far less
I would imagine. So how this would work then is that so if it's a third party, what's happening is that
Google, so the ads served on YouTube come from Google Ad Manager or you can think of
it as sort of like the AdSense inventory as well. But especially on videos that are maybe owned and operated by large media publishers, they'll
get an ad server and they're able to sort of like carve out sort of their inventory
certain types of viewers and stuff like that and sell that in what they call private marketplace
which just means that they're able to choose which advertisers. So if they work with like 10 big brands, they can tell them, hey, you can go buy the premium
inventory or ad space on our videos over here where you can bid a little bit higher, still
run through Google, still serve through Google. And it's like it's a certain maybe 10% of their video space that they're selling through those
And then Google will allow them to sell the rest of it on the open exchange, which is
all Google's advertisers inside of AdSense. And you also have the massive amount of third party ad networks and exchanges that all bid
inside of Google. So what's happening is, is that Google, to work with all these different parties in the
exchange, they do have a data funnel that comes out of YouTube
And that means that there's cookies and trackers and stuff like that and that
And these third parties that they're working with, they're really great at sneaking in
stuff that they're not supposed to to collect data. And realistically, I would almost bet that whatever third party has been collecting this
data, they're coping them for ads. Google's probably unaware of it. Or if they are, they turn a blind eye to it, I would guess
This is just my, me hypothesizing, I suppose. And then on top of that, I would say that the third parties, there's a really good chance
that they didn't even know that they were doing it. This kind of stuff happens a lot where third parties are actually don't understand the
data that they're collecting and what it's getting used for. They just know that they're collecting the data and then maybe whatever sort of fence
that they put around children's data or whatever, it's like that fence isn't secure enough to
account for, I don't know, the way that the data is presented in that exchange, for example
Because things don't always connect perfectly. It's not always apple to apple
So their fence that they may use to protect the data they collected from children, maybe
that fence is a little bit different than the one that Google provides. And so those things don't just add up
So a little bit further down the rabbit hole for those who are interested in the topic
I won't spend too much more time on it because I know I got pretty boring there for a second
But YouTube and a sort of like related, but maybe also unrelated matter in this case
is partnering with Universal Music for responsible AI development. So the music AI incubator that they're sort of partnering on involves artists and generative
AI experiments and research. YouTube addresses challenges posed by generative AI, such as copyright abuse, something we
talked about earlier. And this partnership aims to give artists more control over how their music is used
with AI technology. So last week we talked about watermarks and the impact that, you know, like it's not a
great system today. It's not going to be a better one tomorrow
And really as an individual publisher, it's very hard to copyright your content in a way
that makes it unable to be sort of stolen. And even if it is, then you think about the legal path that you have for some kind of restitution
It's very difficult. Publishers have always been in a tough spot in this case
However, when you start messing with the money and you start thinking about, well, if I can't
copyright any content, it's a trouble for me. You know, you have to think where does my content go
Well, YouTube, Google, Facebook, all these platforms, Universal Music, even to a larger
degree, if you think about like musical artists, all of these artists are forced to give their
content to these platforms to create a reach. And ultimately, these guys see a risk here too
So what do you need? Some nice content. You got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it
And that's exactly what's going on with YouTube and this Universal Music group sort of AI
development project is they're trying to find a way that, yeah, an individual website or
publisher or content creator may not be able to successfully sort of like keep people from
stealing their original content. But all of them on the YouTube platform or all of them under the Universal Music group
probably should. So these are the parties that are likely going to be able to do something about the originality
or origination of content. The downside of this and where publishers need to be really weary is overpromising this
area because these groups usually don't care about individual publishers. They care more about the herd
And so no one is going to protect you here. So I'd be very cautious
And ultimately, there's no collective bargaining in this space. So unfortunately, you can be as cautious as you want
But yeah, your voice is not as strong as it probably should be in this matter
And that's a shame. But I would take close attention to what's going on here
With what power you have, I would say basically vote in your best interest, which is you don't
want somebody else governing this, no matter who it might be and how much it might short
term, you know, like maybe mitigate a risk or a concern or a fear that you have
Now, Manny, is there anything in that for you that's sort of like concerning or maybe
I'm just being cynical again? I mean, I understand where they're coming from
It's Drake or Snoop Dogg released a brand new album, but all that entire album was AI
generated and he just changed it a little bit. But it's very distinctly Snoop Dogg's voice should Snoop Dogg still get a cut
And I think that this is an interesting partnership that YouTube is now taking on that coincides
with that US court story from earlier where AI is not going to be copyrighted
So that just kind of further raises the question, where's that line
Just a question. Where's that line? Should we copyright artwork? Should we not copyright music or vice versa
Which way do we go? Yeah. And with everything like this, it's whenever..
I generally believe that all these things sort of find their own solutions
And usually how it happens is that somebody's money is grossly affected and then it's grossly
affected enough where it's like somebody with a lot of money or somebody who having their
money affected affects a lot of other parties. Then largely those problems start to get solved or solutions get found or that money is navigated
over to some other area where sort of everything kind of moves
I would say individuals in this space usually are never the winners. It's usually those that are on the right side of history
So as a publisher, I can say that creating original content, you're always probably on
the right side of history. I just avoid faking all your whatever to one wagon
How's that go? And our final sort of pedigree for today, and I'll kind of buzz through some of these
because I know that social media is maybe not on the top of mind in the same way that
it is something like Google or AI. But I do find it really interesting because there's correlations here all across our industry
And that is the first story is actually one that could sound very familiar to publishers
because it's an annual one. And this is brands have halted spending on X, formerly Twitter
And so brands have paused their ad spending on X due to pro and quote Nazi content
X faces challenges amidst paywalling X pro, which is then cutting off their API access
to third parties for free. And we've also got these instances now of Instagram testing multi-advertiser ads
which is something that's so. And we talked a couple of weeks ago about how publishers need to catch up to sort of
like the content creators with the new Google follow this publisher function and stuff like that
And publishers became becoming more like influencers or YouTubers. This is a case where the social platforms are actually trying to deal with the problems
that the digital sort of like web has dealt with for a long time
So this is an instance where finally web publishers can kind of look back and go
ha ha, now we're ahead of you. And brands saying they don't want their ads showing next to extremist content or hateful content
Publishers have dealt with this for a very long time. It's about that time of year where Procter and Gamble and Unilever decide that Google
has done this too much and they raise a big stink about it
And then all of a sudden Google says that they're going to provide better controls
and they roll out a whole bunch of speakers that somehow make Google more money but are actually harder to navigate for advertisers
And we move on. And so now X will largely have to do the same thing
So good luck to them. It's a problem that cannot be solved with the existing infrastructure for advertising
that we have today, programmatically at least. Now we've got X also saying that they're going to try to focus on their profitability
This is something they've struggled with and they've talked a little bit about their future plans in this. So their new CEO, Linda Iaccarino, I've read the name many times
but I apologize if I don't quite get it right. I'm from the Midwest
And so you're going to find that I get a lot of names wrong. And so X's future profitability is really challenged by things that are sort of more existential
So you have, you know, they've been talking about getting rid of the block feature
And, you know, I think Elon has kind of drove home his perspective on the issue is that
you don't have the right to basically keep somebody's voice from being heard
You can use it and you can try to not listen to it. But to physically stop somebody from being able to communicate is something that she is
you know, against their sort of life principles. But it leads to the larger discussion which X recently said that
you have the freedom of speech, not the freedom of reach. And this is something that Facebook had said a long time ago when they had camped down
and they'd gotten a lot of sort of the same sort of kind of pushback
both legally and just from the public on, you know, if you stop somebody from being, if you all of a sudden have an audience that you build
and this platform keeps you from being able to reach it the same way
is that an infringement on your right to free speech? And Producer Manning and I were talking about this before the show
but it's really a right, like, who's sort of like lock do you want to throw yours in with
Because it's a glass half empty, glass half full, where does X have to provide you a boost to your voice
Freedom of speech means you have the freedom to talk about something. It doesn't mean you have the freedom to, like, be heard saying it
And that is something that has been established in terms of our law
and our judicial system in the United States. However, that doesn't necessarily, it's not the same thing as this idea of reach
because if I build an audience, so if I'm out talking in the public square
and a bunch of people come up and they start listening to me, or if the authorities come along and start, like, pushing a lot of those people out
have you disrupted my right to free speech? No, not necessarily. However, by removing people from being able to listen to me
you sort of have disrupted sort of my right to be able to, like
say something to certain people. So it's this gray area, because what you've done is
even if it's a scenario in which they're claiming, well, we're amplifying some voices
not downgrading others or whatever, you could still argue that not treating everybody the same
means that there's a chance that I have an audience that wants to hear what I have to say
that you're stopping from hearing me. So you have this right to free speech, you have that
You don't have a right necessarily to be heard, you don't have to have, nobody has to help you be heard saying whatever it is
whether it's hateful or inspiring or whatever. But when somebody does want to hear
and a third party disrupts that, is that an infringement on your free speech
You don't know. Everybody, I'm sure, have you had an opinion on it
Producer Manny, do you have an opinion on it? It's kind of been the common theme for this episode
so many just gray areas and fine lines that we're blocking. Because, yeah, you can make an argument that if someone says something too crazy
it could cause damage, but at the same time you don't want to infringe on their rights
So, yeah, it's a topic. And I think you always have to look at this with the worst cases in mind
because it really gives you the idea of what are the rights
So if it's something that actually causes physical harm, like a screaming fire in a crowded theater or whatever
we have parameters for that, but we don't have parameters for whenever somebody is stopping somebody else
from listening to you whenever they want to listen. And I think that that's going to be something that is not going to be solved anytime soon
It's complicated enough from a sort of thinking through it from a mental exercise standpoint
but I don't imagine the legal sort of like chain of events from here on out is going to get much simpler
So, yeah, I would say don't count on anything too soon on that
And then the last that we hadn't put up in our social realm was Instagram's new ad layout
So Instagram is testing a new ad layout combining four sponsored posts into one screen
So you can think of this as ads jammed into four quarters of an ad space
as opposed to one big one. And the new format, you know, one of the things that was talked about in the story was this new format might lead to user annoyance
affecting CQR and ROI from advertisers. Advertisers, or is it the format is designed
or the format isn't designed to help users discover and compare products from various businesses
which is why Instagram made it and one of the reasons why they think that it's a good format
So this is an area where I get kind of frustrated with sort of like the advertising journalism space because nobody knows
I hate whenever people reference user experience or whatever, whenever it's what they mean is my opinion
My opinion about what a user likes and what a user doesn't like is that this is bad
Let's say you have a, you know, 300 by 250 ad space
What's the difference to a user if there's one big ad or a thousand little ones in there
Now that's an advertiser experience that might suck because the advertiser might feel like they're not going to get the same level of engagement
Now, imagine for an advertiser, you can say you can split, you can have one big ad for a dollar or you can have one fourth of a big ad for 25 cents
For a dollar, you know, you get the whole space. Maybe that's more engaging to a user for 25 cents, a fourth of the cost
maybe not quite as engaging, but like maybe still a chance. So like, you know, that's their call to make
And for Instagram, if it is something that's affecting users, that's for them to measure and to be able to decide, you know, is this, is the cost benefit, you know, worth it
Because ultimately in publishers, you guys are in this boat too. You get to decide what the price is for your content
Content isn't free. It doesn't come out of thin air. Somebody makes it
And so content has a price and it's up to every person who sells your content what that price is
And so if Instagram is like, yeah, it's annoying to our users, but advertisers pay us more
Instagram is free to use. If you want to see ads, if you don't want to see ads, they don't have an ad free model
So if you're only 40, that's the price. If I don't want to buy something because it's too expensive, I don't buy it
I think that's pretty simple. Well, we did have some questions this week actually coming from users
I think we've got kind of like a backlog here of a couple questions that have popped up over
So, Manny, what do we got? So we got a question from Craig Smith-Gask, UI2XX on YouTube
Can you cover the upcoming deprecation of third-party cookies in 2024 and how it will affect publishers
Also, what steps will Novode take to maintain publisher access? So we got one question here on the ego specific
So the depreciation of third-party cookies, I think 2019 was when it was supposed to happen
So 2024 now. Weird, weird, because every year in between was like the year
Yeah, I've covered this in a lot of different places and even on this show before
but I'll give you the brief example, which is, you know, a war is unfair
And, you know, there's an asymmetry of data or asymmetry of capability
If one country has guns and weapons and airplanes and the other country doesn't
they have horseback and they've got their fists and sticks. It's unfair
And what you're going to see is that the party that has the weaponry is going to be the one that's dominant
And so with third-party cookies going away, I mean, they've been gone for everything that's not basically like Chrome and desktop for a long time
And so you're going to see already that that weakens the majority of web traffic
So it doesn't apply to like 60% of all visits across the Internet
Beyond that, really, it's only Google who self-imposed this, you know, sort of deadline that they keep kicking back on themselves
And, you know, it's giving them an advantage. Once it goes away, everybody else will just be on the even playing field
Because right now you have this hybrid model where in some cases you can use third-party cookies for targeting
In other cases, you can't. Apple blocks it all on any Apple devices
And so they, you know, it disrupted Facebook a while back. So nothing will happen
Publishers should make more money because it keeps, it'll affect advertisers more than publishers
because advertisers now can't just throw a cookie on a web page and then say
I want to just target those people. That system is not really as good as Google and Facebook sold it to them a decade ago
when they were the ones that pushed this and promoted it. If they just put these pixels on, they're like, you know, infallible
And you're going to be able to buy this audience that you know is the right one for really cheap and it'll be great
The problem is, is that it doesn't work that way. Like, I mean, any advertiser now that's worth their salt, especially running programmatic campaigns
you know, you got to keep an eye on that stuff because those audiences are just not accurate
And they expand and they say, you want to find visitors like those visitors
Well, visitors that are like visitors that visit theglobe.com, for example, it's, you know
like I don't know what they would say look alike though, but if you start pairing them with like topics like WordPress and stuff
we're likely to get, you know, development agencies, which are not our customers
So I would say that third party cookies are really bad for advertisers and made them lazy
Now they need to care about where their ads go and they need to put more time and energy into how they structure audiences and campaigns
And that means that if you make good original content, you should make more money from it
So that's how it'll affect publishers. And everybody wants to make you scared of this
I'm not a publisher, by the way, everybody wants you to be afraid of it because they want you to sort of like say
well, I need to get bundled together with, you know, or go with this platform or, you know, this, you know, party
because they say they've got something that replaces third party cookies. There's no replacement
And everybody wants to be the one that comes in and replaces something. But Google would never let that happen
And no one else is even remotely big enough to even put a dent in it
So just to give you guys an idea, there's a lot of parties in the space that want you to think differently about that
And I'm here to tell you with no horse in the race that there's absolutely, there's no risk there
And then we got other questions about, it looks like mostly Azilla questions remaining
Yeah, we got one from Gene and I'll include the full username because I don't want to mispronounce anything
Is there anyone that can help me get past the final barrier of ad manager
So we don't know very much about Azilla. I hope our listeners appreciate the fact that one of the things that made me feel good from the very start was I completely
like kind of separated from my role as an executive at Azilla
But, you know, there are cross layers where it's like either our experiences or different things like that cross over
And I'm happy to talk about it. But this question is actually kind of a support question
The question is how do you get ad manager approval? Well, through a partner like Azilla, you're actually getting what they call a child account
So Google Ad Manager is Google's ad server. And where a lot of the antitrust legislations come from recently, short side
is really from the fact that Google's ad manager, their ad server, is connected to the world's largest ad exchange, Google's ad exchange
So if you're a publisher and make any money ever from ads programmatically on display with maybe extreme rare exceptions
mostly from large publishers, you cannot make enough money from ads to, you know
be even remotely relevant to what you do without a party like Google
So AdSense is just Google's inventory. And the reason why publishers want access to Google Ad Manager is they don't really want Google's ad server
which is a piece of text that's arguably not even the best ad server that's out there
They want access to Google's ad exchange, which is only available through Google Ad Manager
which means you get all of Google's advertisers inside of AdSense plus thousands of other ad networks that all bid in there
So you go, why would these ad networks bid against each other and bid against Google in this open market when, you know, like Google is their competitor
Why would they help them? Because Google's reach, the number of sites that show Google ads is just too much business to pass up
You could never, I mean, you can't make it as an ad network not bidding inside of Google's ad exchange
And because of that, it makes a lot more money than something like AdSense. So everybody wants access to it
And most publishers have no idea what the difference is. Ad exchange, Google's ad exchange, an ad network
with a partner like Ezoic or a Google certified partner that is allowing access to Ad Manager
nobody understands the differences between these things. But for Ad Manager approval as a child account, the main things you need to worry about are basic Google policy issues
And so you want to make sure that you're aligned with Google policy. And then outside of that, inside Baseball and Ezoic, it's like you're probably using the wrong email account
Whatever account, AdSense or Google accounts your site may be already connected to
if you're using a different email address or something like that, sometimes that could be an issue
So somebody can fix that for you. And then one more question here, and it's pertaining to Ezoic in particular on our future
And Manny, I'll let you kind of like break this one down for me. Yeah, so JBN011A on YouTube asks, is Ezoic still solid and safe for publishers to use
What does Ezoic have in store for the future? It's mainly safe
It depends on two definitions here, but I guess I'm guessing they mean maybe from a financial standpoint
We've been a profitable company for the majority of the last decade and one of the few ones that have been
We've been very responsible. We've been a growth company that has been very leery of sort of like the trappings of, you know, getting overextended
And so like everyone in the tech space, we've unfortunately had to do layoffs and other things like that over the last, you know, four to six months
And, you know, that's tough, but I think AI blunts a lot of that because you're able to, everybody's able to do more
That being said, Ezoic is one of the largest partners. I mean, if you go look at our footprint, you know, when you look at global Internet traffic
I think global Internet traffic running through a proxy or a CDN, which is the majority of
Ezoic sites and our visitors that we see each month make up almost 1% of the entire Internet
And so when you, if you're associated with something like ads, anybody else that's not Google or Amazon or something like that
they're not, they don't even show up on the radar. So we're still the largest and biggest company in this space doing anything like what we're doing
And so I think we're pretty safe on that accord, safer than anybody else
And then as it relates to safe for, you know, the future, I would say safe from the standpoint of, you know
protecting your site against weird policy stuff and being able to navigate changes in the space
We spend probably considerable engineering time to help publishers stay prepared for things like TCPA, GDPR
ads.tech, third-party cookies. We have engineers that are working on that stuff all the time
And I think that, you know, that's a huge benefit to publishers because it's, that's the most frustrating thing about this space is how so much stuff comes along to stop a problem
It doesn't work. And then publishers end up getting saddled with the responsibility for it
Ads.tech is a great example of that. And so for the future, I would just say, our mission, if we have one, is that we help publishers
So what is it that will help publishers in the future? I think in the future it's being able to build audiences as much as it is to be able to build revenue from the content
I think building audiences in the future looks quite a bit different than it does today
But one thing is for sure, and that's content is king. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon if you've ever heard that before
And so, yeah, I think we're going to help publishers continue to make and market their content
but monetize their content as well. And, you know, where that lives and how it looks might look different in the future
And so we're trying to anticipate that as best we can. And I think that's it
Producer Manning, thanks for joining me again today. I appreciate you spinning the wheels and potting me up and potting me down
And thank you for all of our loyal listeners. If you have a question or a comment, you can go to publisherlab.org
We'd love to hear from you and answer any questions you have here live on the show
And you can text us or watch us pretty much anywhere you text or listen to podcasts
YouTube is the best place to find us if you want to watch the show
And I think that's it. Thanks, everybody, for watching or listening to another episode of The Publisher Lab