Bye bye to Google's FLoC, hello Google Topics. My thoughts.

Google announced that the FLoC raan, they ran so far awaay... Is "Topics" just FLoC 2.0? I took a look at their spec, here are my thoughts. In short, Topics is a much lighter-weight API that effectively generates interest categories that can then be exposed by the Chrome browser when called by the publisher that can the be passed through the bidstream.?

It has two major advantages over FLoC that I can see:

?? We don't lose the auction process to Google (FLoC suggested it remain in-browser, and pre-done for the next ad before it's requested)

??It appears significantly less taxing bandwidth-wise

Granted it’s my first read through the documentation, so I might not have it 100%, but there appear to be several limitations:

??Any browser will have no more than 6 active segments at a time for a given publisher

??No publisher will be able to see segments that it didn’t collect

??5% of all segments assigned to browsers will be fake

??As data gets more and more generalized, it gets less and less valuable (for ex., segments of Males 18-34 years old might be worth $0.20 CPM, while Auto Intenders a $0.60 CPM, and 3-7 year old Suburban owners a $1.50)?

??By inferring that we would not use other data they are effectively removing all competitive advantage industry wide

??All innovative data would theoretically drop out of the Market

??All targeting would be the same

??They limit access to segments in a way that makes it really hard to use them unless you are a mega-publisher, and even then, a mega-publisher under a single top-level domain (for ex., I shop for a new car for 30 minutes on Kelly Blue Book one day, but read SFgate.com every day. KBB gets that I am in the market for a Suburban, SF gate gets that I’m interested in local politics... All SUV advertisers care about one and not the other, and SF Gate depends on others knowing that information to keep their CPMs up... with Topics, SF Gate’s revenue tanks, and, Even if KBB was selling ad space programmatically, they could sell enough impressions of me to move the needle on site)

Those are my initial impressions. What are your takeaways and predictions? Let me know! ??