RTB House, the ad tech platform powered by unique deep learning algorithms, today (February 27th, 2023) releases a second instalment of FLEDGE API testing. This follows its whitepaper, released in October, outlining the initial results of early-stage experiments. 

The research found that the scale of users testing the Privacy Sandbox proposal has significantly increased compared to the last set of results. The number of unique users added to interest groups equalled almost 20 million in December compared to less than 1 million in August. However, despite the significant increase, the scale is still very low compared to traditional, cookie-based ad buying. On the other hand, RTB House has significantly increased the number of our advertisers that have managed to display a FLEDGE-based ad. Over 46% of our performance advertisers have done so in January alone.

A lack of prioritisation is why various marketers haven’t begun testing, which is surprising considering the timeline. In approximately 6 months FLEDGE is expected to be generally available in Chrome, and in 1.5 years third-party cookies are supposed to be deprecated. Apart from one exception, none of the supply-side platforms (SSPs) are actively testing FLEDGE. Low adoption of FLEDGE among SSPs is a serious and surprising issue, given that multi-ssp connections are technically allowed by the Chrome team both in the specification and its current implementation in Chrome.

Finally, the outcomes of tests may influence the timeline of third-party cookies deprecation. If tests prove that required adjustments to the proposal are more extensive than currently expected, another delay may be announced.