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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

They're phasing out consumption of 3rd-party advertising data, because they're transitioning to becoming a provider of 3rd-party advertising data:

> Beginning in July, The Times will begin to offer clients 45 new proprietary first-party audience segments to target ads.

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No, it's first-party. Advertisers buy NYT audiences as defined by NYT itself using its own data.

You can't buy segments or even use them anywhere else so there's no 3rd-party access.

None of that is third party data.

NYT is the party segmenting their users and allowing segments to be targeted.

So when Google segments users and allows the NYT to target them, that's third party data, but when the NYT segments users and allows e.g. Walmart to target them, it's not?

It does not seem as if they will give others access to the data, rather advertisers can go directly to NYT and choose which segments to target.

this seems like a more than reasonable approach - actually relevant ads, not pedsonalised ads.

In one case Google is retailing the ads and talking to purchasers. The content is subject to Google's review and approval. And, Google has all of the data (quite fine-grained, since that's all they do). Because there is a third party in the transaction (NYT, consumer, Google), it gets the name.

In the latter case, NYT does not share its customer data with google. NYT ad dept is responsible for the editorial and aesthetic signoff of all advertisements. And, arguably, less data collection overall because advertisement is not NYT's business strength.

First-party is when the provider of the data is also the owner of the property where that data was collected and used.

Google segments used on Google properties = 1st-party. Google segments used on other sites = 3rd-party.

NYT segments used on NYT = 1st-party. NYT segments can't be used anywhere else because they don't make them available nor do they want to.

Who knows what will be leaked in the segment data though?

Barring a technical blunder why does anything have to be leaked in a "here are the customer segments we offer, give us an ad and we'll show it to our users and give you a report on impressions and clicks" model?

The ad purchasers are the third parties. The NYT and the reader are the other two parties.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. While they may still have relationships with 3rd party data brokers, this sounds like a 1st party data play on the surface, particularly since data onboarding vendors like Liveramp, etc. still need to prove their solutions will work in a post-cookie world after the upcoming Chrome update and in the face of increasing privacy legislation.

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