After two previous delays, 2024 was supposed to be the year that we all said goodbye to third-party cookies. Surprise, surprise: There’s another delay.
Google recently announced that “we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4,” and “we envision proceeding with third-party cookie deprecation starting early next year.”
Third-party cookies are data files created by website domains other than the one a user is visiting. The data storage is used to identify a visitor’s digital footprint, personalize website experiences and track specific browsing history for retargeting across websites.
Google first promised to phase out support for third-party cookies in 2020, then delayed it to 2023 due to the pandemic and pushback within the industry. Cookie deprecation in Chrome was then pushed back to 2024, and now it’ll be 2025 at the earliest.
Our advice for nonprofit organizations? Keep using third-party cookies while you can, but continue to build around your first-party data for the long term. First-party data will always be yours, and it can already be leveraged to create personalized donor experiences.
The TikTok ban is now real—or is it?
A couple of months ago in this space, we pondered whether TikTok would really be banned in the U.S. Well, we have our answer.
President Biden signed a law requiring TikTok’s parent company—Beijing-based ByteDance—to sell the platform within six months or face a ban. So that means no more TikTok by the end of 2024, right? Not exactly.
The timeline gets pretty muddy, especially once legal challenges start to emerge. The first came on May 14 as eight TikTok content creators joined together to sue the U.S. government.
If your nonprofit is actively involved on TikTok, now is not the time to bail. Keep an eye on the latest developments as this drama continues to play out.
Google search may be on the decline
Many marketers were shocked and confused when an April report by Statcounter showed Google taking a massive hit to its share of the search market. As it turns out, that data was very wrong.
However, there is a trend to note here—just not as dramatic as it initially seemed. Google did drop its market share from 88.9% in April 2023 to 86.6% in April 2024. Meanwhile, Bing has gone from 6.4% to 8.2%, and Yahoo has gone from 2.3% to 2.6%.
These aren’t huge moves, but there are two factors at play here:
- People have been dissatisfied with Google’s search results for some time now.
- AI services like ChatGPT and Meta AI are relying on Bing for searches.
On top of that, OpenAI is making plans to launch its own search engine in the near future. Ars Technica reports that “the search.chatgpt.com URL is being set up, and Google employees are being poached.”
These are definitely trends to consider as you allocate your digital media budgets in the months ahead.
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