Findings from the early FLEDGE experiments

It has been three years since Google first announced the depreciation of third-party cookies and began the development of the Google Privacy Sandbox, with the deadline pushed back again to 2024. The reason is "the need for more time to evaluate and test the new technologies". Despite positive developments, RTB House’s own tests of the FLEDGE proposal, with nearly 8 million ads in 50 countries, have shown that there is still plenty of work to be done to build effective cookieless alternatives. 

In order to understand what is working and what is causing bottlenecks, an RTB House team has prepared a whitepaper detailing our findings from these early FLEDGE trials and where we go from here. Published in the SSRN database, this whitepaper is now available for you to read, and this article will provide a brief summary of our findings.

Key Insights: 

• Google built the Privacy Sandbox to give advisers privacy-friendly tools to reach new and existing consumers
• RTB House has successfully executed adding users to interest groups on more than 2,700 advertiser websites
• The trial included 1.2 million users from 225 countries
• RTB House could only observe three companies actively testing FLEDGE by adding users to interest groups: Google, Criteo, and RTB House
• 17 publishers were able to fully integrate the code necessary to participate in the experiment
• Only two supply-side platforms chose to join the trial so far, citing a number of business and technological concerns, yet none of them allowed for testing out a complete programmatic integration