Goodbye Cookie—Hello Token

State of the Industry

The industry is reeling from the pending demise of the cookie. It’s been a central component to how the programmatic ecosystem functions – how it targets audiences, enables attribution, tracks fraud, location, and more. Once the cookie takes its final bow, the IAB forecasted that publishers could lose as much as $10B in 2022. To put this into context, at least 40% of most publisher inventory is non-cookied or unaddressable and therefore less eligible for programmatic revenue. By 2022, that number will grow to a staggering 90-95% for many publishers since approximately 5% of publisher supply is authenticated today. Without a comprehensive and scaled approach to addressability, many publishers are likely to face tough times.

Why We Rearchitected the Exchange to Put the Publisher First

The future of the open internet is at stake since many publishers may not survive a dramatic hit in revenue. Few publishers have the time, resources, or means to build ID solutions, let alone integrate these solutions into the broader ad tech ecosystem to make them interoperable. In order to compete, publishers need a simple and effective way to implement addressability and create audience segmentation at programmatic scale. We just didn’t see a marketplace solution that focused on helping the publisher thrive.

Don’t get me wrong, there are an abundance of identity solutions. The math just didn’t add up to focus solely on the small fraction of authenticated traffic.

Lexicon™— A publisher first identity solution

Introducing Lexicon, an identity graph created specifically for publishers. In a world where fragmented identity threatens publisher revenue, Lexicon gives every publisher the technology they need to make all of their inventory addressable, build scaled audiences, increase monetization, and honor consumer privacy choices. Fully integrated into the 33Across Exchange, Lexicon provides publishers with a real-time identity resolution to reach 500 million US browsers. The Lexicon Pub Token is a common reference point for addressability and honors consumer privacy.

How Lexicon immediately helps our publishers:
  • Open Web Revenue: Built-in addressability increases value on quality inventory that was previously bypassed by most of programmatic demand
  • No ID or Data Fees: More revenue without the extra ad tax
  • No Technical Lift: Integrated ID graph for seamless monetization

Until now, non-cookied inventory has much less value without the ability for buyers to target audiences or measure performance. Publishers need the ability to have maximum competition across all of their impressions — regardless of which browser is used by the consumer. Lexicon gives publishers a comprehensive and scalable solution to help them become less dependent on browsers so they can continue to focus on creating great content.