Garrett Johnson

The piece cites our research on the impact of privacy regulation on made-for-kids content on YouTube. This work with @tesary.bsky.social, Liang Zhong, & James Cooper was recently accepted at Management Science. 2/2
threadreaderapp.com/thread/17379...

The World’s Most-Watched YouTube Video Hasn’t Made Its Creator Rich The Korean company behind the ubiquitous song “Baby Shark” is hampered by ad restrictions on children’s content but wants to raise funds for expansion via an IPO.

Quoted in The Wall Street Journal piece on Pinkfong, maker of the most watched YouTube video ever "Baby Shark". 1/2

www.wsj.com/tech/the-wor...

Europe Begins Rethinking Its Crackdown on Big Tech

Gift article: "Europe Begins Rethinking Its Crackdown on Big Tech"
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/t...

The Science of Creative (And Other Hot Takes) with Uber and Dr. Squatch

The paradigm shift in performance ad creative is just mind blowing for marketers.
open.spotify.com/episode/2BWI...

Notably, Chrome announces its support of the W3C’s proposed interoperable Attribution standard.

In sum, PETs lives on in advertising, but are focused on measurement rather than targeting.

Update on Plans for Privacy Sandbox Technologies In this October 2025 announcement, the Privacy Sandbox team shares updates on plans for Privacy Sandbox technologies.

Google is largely shutting down the Privacy Sandbox.
Surviving: CHIPS, FedCM, Private State Tokens
Out 💀 : (Anything you’ve heard of!) Topics, Protected Audience API, Attribution Reporting API, Private Aggregation, Related Web Sites…
privacysandbox.com/news/update-...

Today, the UK Competition & Markets Authority decided to release Google from its Privacy Sandbox-related commitments.
Read more: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68f213...

Exclusive | Advertisers Push Big Tech to Adopt Standards for Transparency in Ad Sales A new proposal asks digital ad auctions to voluntarily disclose how they pick winners and set prices.

Quoted in this The Wall Street Journal piece on proposed standards for ad auctions, which are critical to ensuring the efficiency & integrity of modern advertising.

www.wsj.com/articles/adv...

SOUTH CAROLINA… “Judge Goodstein was walking on the beach when the fire started. Her husband, Arnie, was in the house with children and perhaps grandchildren. The family had to escape by jumping from a window or balcony...” www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

Opinion | Where’s Your Evidence, Mr. President?

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/o...

Horrific. mRNA vaccines have saved millions of lives and could save millions more.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business,” said Mike Osterholm, a UMN expert on infectious diseases & pandemic preparations.
www.huffpost.com/entry/rfk-va...

Imagine a group of 5-year-olds playing a board game. The rules are clear, the goal is fair, and one child edges ahead — until, suddenly, another child starts losing. That’s when the trouble begins. “He cheated!” the losing child yells. “I’m the winner anyway!” he declares. And then, like clockwork, he flips the board. In the world of kindergarten conflict resolution, we expect this kind of behavior. We chalk it up to development. We teach better sportsmanship. What do we do when the president of the United States behaves this way? On Friday, President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the nation’s workaday scorekeeper of employment, wages and productivity. Why? Because the data didn’t make Mr. Trump look good. The statistics were inconvenient. So the president didn’t just challenge the findings; he fired the statistician. That’s not governing. That’s board flipping.

Janet Yellen's husband & Econ Nobel Laureate George Akerlof:

"...when presidents flip the board, it’s not just a game that ends. It’s the pieces of democracy that get scattered to the floor."
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/o...

ICE is hiring! U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking for highly motivated, morally indifferent individuals to join our team. Open positions include: ★Senior Goon ★Racism Enforcement Officer ★ Unmarked Van Driver (Part-Time) Experience with children a plus usajobs.gov

Covenant Eyes We know about your secret iPad, Mike Johnson

Signal. The official app of U.S. state secrets

BURT'S SHRIMP® SHRIMP LIP BALM with VITAMIN E & LEMON 100% NATURAL BURT'S SHRIMP® LIP BALM We warned you that our bees were dying, and you did fucking nothing.

I subscribe to @theonion.com for the ads.

Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Kirsti Noem, Joseph Mazzara, Emil Bove, Drew Sargent, and everyone else involved in planning, executing, and obstructing justice around the CECOT imprisonments are responsible for Andry's torture and rape.

Each bears a share of the blame. Don't ever let them forget it.

U.S. liquor sales have dried up in Canada amid trade war, industry says - National | Globalnews.ca The spirits industry says the sales of American-made products dropped 66 per cent in March and April after several provinces pulled their goods from store shelves.

Industry data shows that from March 5 until April 30, sales of U.S. spirits in Canada fell by 66.3 per cent compared with the same period last year.

globalnews.ca/news/1129832...

This is Goose. He's here to perform his own rendition of "Piano Man" by Billy Joel. 13/10 please enjoy

He lived and worked here for 40 years. My god I am so ashamed at what's happening.

Congress rolls back $9 billion in public media funding and foreign aid The House approved a Trump administration plan to rescind $9 billion in previously allocated funds, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The House approved a Trump administration plan to rescind $9 billion in previously allocated funds, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Woman using a laptop

Can Privacy Technologies Replace Cookies? Ad Revenue in a Field Experiment.
This study suggests that current #privacy-enhancing technologies fall short of fully compensating for the economic value of cookies.
http://spkl.io/63325fCCOL
@garjoh.bsky.social @sjkobayashi.bsky.social

Amazon has started selling AI video ads. What does this mean for digital marketing? Gen AI can quickly customize ads for different audiences, but it remains to be seen if they'll hold humans' attention in the long-run.

Quoted in this Marketplace piece on gen AI ad creatives

www.marketplace.org/story/2025/0...

No Shade, But Does Anyone Still Care About The Privacy Sandbox? | AdExchanger Despite all the drama, companies haven’t completely abandoned the Privacy Sandbox, and BU's Garrett Johnson has the receipts to prove it.

@OSchiffey covered our recent research on the Privacy Sandbox’s performance for publishers and its adoption after Google abandoned its cookie deprecation plans.

@AdExchanger www.adexchanger.com/data-privacy...

Privacy-Enhanced versus Traditional Retargeting: Ad Effectiveness in an Industry-Wide Field Experiment 💡Imagine a world 🌎 where ads respect your privacy and still work! 🚫🍪 🚨Our latest research dives into Google’s Privacy Sandbox, which tries to make this happen. Here’s what we learn from an experiment ...

PS On a more optimistic note, we have related research with 2K+ advertisers that shows Sandbox retained 82–93% of advertiser outcomes on a per-dollar or per-impression basis.
www.linkedin.com/pulse/privac...

10/ 📝 Paper: "Can Privacy Technologies Replace Cookies? Ad Revenue in a Field Experiment"
By Zhengrong Gu, myself, & @sjkobayashi
ssrn.com/abstract=528...
Let us know what you think. Questions welcome!

Table 8: Treatment Effect Estimates: Country Heterogeneity

9/ 🇪🇺 Notably, the EU faces greater regulatory pressure under #GDPR.
➡️EU has more impressions without cookies (43%) and experiences greater revenue losses when cookies are removed (-66%).
➡️Sandbox performs better in the EU: recovering 22% of lost revenue.

8/ 🕛 Second: latency. On-device auctions are slow.
The 75th percentile ad latency under Privacy Sandbox is 5.7 seconds — more than 2x slower than the other groups. That delay reduces impressions served by 2.85%, yielding no revenue in those cases.

7/ 📦 Why so little recovery?
First: A minority of adtech vendors adopt the Sandbox, placing a ceiling on revenue upside. In our data, 7% of impressions are sold via the Protected Audience API & >27% returned Topics API categories.

6/ 🚑 Can Privacy Sandbox recover the lost revenue?
Not much. Publisher revenue falls 28% under Sandbox—meaning it recovers just 4.2% of what cookies provided.

5/ 🤔 These losses are smaller than prior studies that found ~50% drops.
Why? Raptive uses alternative identifiers—like hashed emails—which soften the blow when cookies are gone.
bsky.app/profile/garj...

Figure 2: Normalized Mean Ad Revenue by Experimental Group

4/ 🍪 Third-party cookies still matter—a lot.
Removing them reduces publisher ad revenue by 29%. For impressions that actually had cookies, the loss is even steeper: 35%.