Videology is an online video ad serving company. For Videology, browser cookies are an important tool that allows them to gather information about users in order to better target advertisements to relevant consumers. However, Videology is concerned that increased disabling or deletion of cookies by internet users will adversely affect their ability to accurately identify user demographics and therefore hurt their business. We will investigate whether cookie deletion is a problem and seek an alternative technology that could possibly replace browser cookies. To investigate the extent of cookie deletion, we integrated sample Videology and Experian data sets for online user traffic. Since unique users identified by Videology represent individual online users, and Experian labels identify individual households, we used this data to project the average number of Internet users identified per household. When compared to the average number of persons per household, it became clear that cookie deletion did not significantly inflate the number of identified users per household, which signifies that cookie deletion is not as prevalent an issue as previously thought. Additionally, we investigated alternative techniques for identifying Internet users, focusing particularly on device fingerprinting and examining how it could be adopted by Videology. At the time of project completion, we expect to have determined the impact of cookie deletion on Videology's business. We will also evaluate alternative identification technologies that Videology may pursue in an effort to mitigate the negative impact of cookie deletion.
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