The Column: St Vincent, Dave Grohl, + Your Online Privacy, Cookies, and Intrusive Technology.
A regular column to entertain, enlighten and inform.
This is the first of a regular column I’ll be writing for all my readers, around longer form article features. Topics will vary but, hopefully this will be entertaining, enlightening, informative, ideally a mixture of all of these and more.
I’m writing this while listening to the highly anticipated new St Vincent album out today. This time Annie Clark has masterminded and self-produced All Born Screaming, which led with the Broken Man single, a key highlight of this album, with its industrial tinge, and for me, Nine Inch Nails influences. Reckless pursues this direction, it’s a great song, reminding me of the essence of The Day The Whole World Went Away. Annie Clarke did cover Piggy from The Downward Spiral remember? Pulling away from the retro flavoured character based concept albums of her more recent work, across All Born Screaming the work is strong, there is an eclectic palate of influence and sounds in her most accomplished work since her MASSEDUCTION and MassEducation albums from 2017 and 2018 and the St Vincent era work of 2014. Justin Meldal-Johnsen still features on bass and synths, Josh Freese and David Grohl feature on drumming duties, all three to be found on Nine Inch Nails output too, pop trivia fans. Many additional musicians are found featuring track by track. So Many Planets flirts with dub tropicana pop. Cate Le Bon features on title track All Born Screaming, closing the album with some kind of Depeche Mode meets industrial throb with harmony, and returning to the flavour the album began with. Give it a listen.
In other news I’ve been visiting a few technology based events this week. A summit on online audience data featuring people from The Guardian, Boots the chemist, and Lloyds Bank, among others. Stay with me…
Since pretty much the beginning of the internet, your favourite websites and quality media publications survive through creating advertising revenue, many still rely on cookies to run that business, outside of mobile app usage. Viewing their news article headlines and previews on the likes of social media platforms returns them no revenue, such platform businesses keep all the ad revenue for themselves. Only when you visit a website or publisher app will they gain an opportunity to earn ad revenue. When you visit a website, and importantly if you allow them to use advertising cookies via those consent pop up’s you see* to either accept or decline, the website’s advertising partners can then drop a cookie on your web browser. Then ad’s may become more relevant for you, or that sofa you looked at online will follow you around the web. Furthermore, your favourite website knows you have returned to read another sports article. The cookie sits on your internet browser for a period of time. Cookies have their pros and cons; they are outdated, and unreliable for such intended purposes, but with their mass adoption they are still used at scale despite more sophisticated methods available. Which is why many publishers now prefer you to log into your own profile for a more personalised experience.
Now cookies will soon be culled forever due to a mixture of reasons, these include, privacy, regulation, and the dominance of Google shifting their business model away from them. Thing is, alternative methods have existed for over a decade that are more privacy compliant and consensual for users of web services. However large areas of the digital industry have been slow to innovate their business model and find new ways to create and monetise readership that paves the way for publication survival, this is for a number of reasons that requires a full article. This fact also reminds me of the music industry circa 2000-2010, it lacked innovation, it never fully recovered. Can the open web thrive, or will society at large allow a handful of big guns to totally dominate the internet and its future iterations? Broader public information on this topic even at a high level is poor at best. Hopefully this has shed some light.
So, however much you might hate adverts and their intrusion, without them your favourite websites, news media and web services will shrink or go bust and die off, the quality of journalism will further dip, those in power are held less to account, democracy is further threatened, etc, you should hopefully get my drift. We have already seen plenty of evidence of this in recent years. So, perhaps understand why the publication you read online asks for some information or perhaps a donation while you continue to read it for free.
Google has announced it won’t allow cookies on Chrome browser from 2025 (Google Chrome has 65% market share, Apple’s Safari is 2nd with 18.5%), publications are frantically embracing new methods to fuel their businesses with this context and increasing privacy regulation. Transparency and trust with media audiences will be critical guiding principles, as they should always be. Be perhaps now a little more aware of the situation at hand.
After listening to some latest publisher and business insights on audience data monetisation, I then visited the Retail Technology Show where among other sightings I saw a display on digital footfall (in store traffic) and software taking approximate gender and age ranges of shoppers to help with product placement. Debate raged on the ethics of doing this.
That’s it for now. Until next time.
Thanks for reading and supporting this publication.
* due to GDPR law that protects your online privacy, that the EU introduced in 2018, when the UK were still in the EU.