Third party cookies and thus large parts of user-based Internet advertising are about to be dampened. Some time ago, Google presented an alternative: FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) which is intended to bring together groups of similar people and thus make them targets for ads.
With this approach, Google hopes to be able to continue to deliver the right advertising to the right users – while observing the current and increasing data protection requirements. The fact that Google does not test FLoC in Europe shows that this will be difficult.
Now the method has another setback: Amazon delivers an HTTP header on (almost) all of its own domains, which prohibits the use of FLoC: “permissions-policy: interest-cohort = ()”. The surfing behaviour on Amazon, which is so important for commercial use, is therefore not possible to evaluate.
This shows the competition between the two platform giants very clearly: Amazon is now the largest advertising network in the USA, after Google and Facebook, and is growing significantly faster than the two leading networks. Forecast: there is more to come …
