The Oatmeal-Rasinification of Cookies

Since the middle of 2024, we have known that third party cookies are no longer on track for full deprecation by Chrome. If you really liked cookies, great, if you were all-in on replacement tech, less great.

But alas, this is and was a trap. Because all cookies aren’t the same. Some are chewy and delicious, like chocolate chip cookies, and some are a trap waiting to be sprung upon honest chocolate chip loving netizens, like oatmeal raisin.¹ Wretched oatmeal raisin cookies from a distance may look like delicious chocolate chip cookies, with their dark spots hinting at chocolate, but no, it’s fruit! Fruit on a cookie!

And increasingly, all third party cookies online are becoming oatmeal raisin.

Already, Chrome is the last bastion of third party cookies, and the scope of their feature set is ever shrinking. All iPhone users are already excluded (every browser on iOS is Safari), as are Safari users, Firefox users (there are literally dozens of us, dozens!), users of most Chromium forks (Brave, Opera), Edge users and the list goes on.

The feature set shrink of what these cookies can do is still ongoing as well.

In short, not only are cookies not capturing as much web traffic as they used to (and shrinking), but they are less useful as well.

As a marketer who would only occasionally indulge in a chocolate chip cookie to begin with, the demand for the oatmeal raisin cookies is, let’s say less than robust.