Social Logins, Increasingly a Liability for Publishers, Are Fading From Sites

Social logins, the options people have to log in to a website with credentials from their social platforms like Facebook or Google, are increasingly falling out of favor among publishers amid increasing privacy regulation and media companies' desire to own their relationship with audiences, four sources told Adweek. When social logins started popping up on publisher webpages in the past decade, adding them to a publisher page was a no-brainer: People had the ease of not making a new password, platforms could benefit from more data about people outside their properties, advertisers had more signals to target, and publishers benefited from this symbiosis. Now that calculus is changing. “In 2017, people were like, ‘I want to track everything everywhere, at all times, just in case I need it,” said Josh Koening, co-founder of Pantheon, a tech company focused on creating and managing websites. “Over the past four, five years that consciousness has shifted. Tracking information about customers can create risks and liabilities.” This paradigm shift reflects the rocky, and evolving, relationship between platforms and publishers. Meta said it would no longer pay publisher partners for content appearing in Facebook's news tab earlier this year. The shift is also representative of how publishers are hoping to capitalize on cookie deprecation upending the media mix to favor first-party data. And finally, it's a result of increased regulation: Sephora’s fine from the state of California proved that social trackers like Facebook's pixel—that many corporations have on their websites—pose legal risks. What Sephora’s $1.2 Million CCPA Settlement Signifies for Brands Diminishing upsides Publishers have long been building up their relationships with audiences directly, but that's easier said than done. Publishers Clearing House, a publisher that offers giveaways and sweepstakes, has hosts of logged-in users but doesn’t use social logins, said Kevin Antoine, head of programmatic revenue operations. “We can get them to log in without Facebook because it’s a relationship between that user and us,” Antoine said. “We want to have a relationship with advertisers and brands that are interested in our audience and not have Google cut in." When a user logs in via a social platform, the publisher does not uniquely own the data. Platforms can sometimes even see what people are doing on publishers’ sites, negating any particular advantage the publisher has over the platform in knowing that person's behavior and interests (to later pass along to advertisers), said Ian Cohen, CEO of Lokker, a software that helps companies protect their consumers' data. “When you’re actually giving third parties access to your logins, you’re giving them everything you do on the site,” Cohen said. Publishers are eager for more logged-in users and subscribers as third-party cookies are set to be deprecated, so incentivizing more people to sign up by allowing them the ease of not creating a new username and password is tempting. But given that the data is no longer exclusive to the publisher, the upside is less clear. “As long as you’re not creating 46 barriers, people are going to be there if they want to be there,” said Jeff Misenti, CEO of The Publisher Desk, a company that offers tech solutions to publishers to grow revenue. Clicking the easy button New privacy legislation, and those currently being debated by legislative bodies, put social logins under particular scrutiny. Earlier this year, Sephora was fined $1.2 million for violating the California Consumer Privacy Act, specifically for failing to disclose that it was selling its users’ information. But Sephora wasn’t selling data in the traditional sense, rather giving third parties access to their users’ data in exchange for ad targeting and measurement tech. The ruling meant that websites using common tools like Facebook pixel and Google analytics could be violating the law. “The precedent it established. You don’t have to be literally selling the data” to violate the law, Koenig said. “You just have to be in a value exchange where people are using that data outside the site.” Koenig said that the data pulled from social logins could be even more invasive than signals gleaned from tracking pixels. While social logins may make life simpler for users, their legal risks can create future difficulties for publishers. “In my personal life, I click the easy button a lot,” Misenti said. “Do you want to click the easy button in your business and take on the liability?”