Can payments networks solve the online ad attribution problem?

I really enjoyed this Mobile Dev Memo podcast where Eric & Rishabh discuss the upcoming third party cookie depreciation and its consequences.

Winners of this new world will be the “walled compounds” of Facebook, Amazon and other major players. In other words, platforms that have a lot of first party data. Losers will be small publishers that lack it. The traffic of these small publishers will become significantly less valuable given with the loss of third party cookies. They can no longer be used for high value ad targeting.

One interesting topic that came up is the role of Shopify and other payments platforms. I’ve always thought that online payment providers are well positioned to solve marketing attribution problems, given that they are legally required to collect data on all transactions. Between Visa, MasterCard, Shopify and Stripe it’s entirely possible to get the single most important information advertisers need to know:

• WHO bought
• WHAT did they buy
• WHEN did they buy it

I’m not sure I agree with their skepticism on credit in e-commerce. Nor would the moneylenders in the image above. It is very much possible to run a profitable e-commerce lender, even if it won’t get the market valuations they saw in 2021.