Welcome to your weekly update on the state of all things European Universal ID – aka: universal IDs, extended IDs, salted hashed email tokens – in the European bidstream.

You’ve been asking us to share European universal/extended ID insights to help make decisions about your identity infrastructure today and in the future, so that’s exactly what you’ll get in this tracker.

Roqad has a front row seat to the European universal ID landscape (among others), and while we can’t speak for every single bid transaction, we have a pretty good view of what is happening.

 

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March 20, 2023 release (Week #10)

Percent of ad requests that use ANY of the universal/extended IDs | Weeks 1-10, 2023

 

Percent of universal/extended IDs in Europe tied to third-party cookies | Weeks 1-10, 2023

% of universal/extended IDs tied to AAID and IDFA | Weeks 1-10, 2023

Group 4: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe (.01% – .125% range)

Group 3: some more of the higher volume ext. IDs in Europe (.75% – .25% range)

Group 2: some of the higher volume IDs in Europe (2% – 6% range)

Group 1: the leader: weekly performance of the adsrvr.org (UID1.0, The Trade Desk)

March 13, 2023 release (Week #9)

Percent of ad requests that use ANY of the universal/extended IDs | Weeks 1-9, 2023

Percent of universal/extended IDs in Europe tied to third-party cookies | Weeks 1-9, 2023

AAID and IDFA tied to extended IDs observed in Europe | Weeks 1-9, 2023

Group 4: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe (.01% – .125% range)

Group 3: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe (.75% – .25% range)

Group 2: some of the higher volume IDs in Europe (2% – 6% range)

A group of 1,the leader: weekly performance of the adsrvr.org extended/universal ID (The Trade Desk)

March 6, 2023 release (Week #8)

Percent of ad requests that use ANY of the universal/extended IDs | Weeks 1-8, 2023

 

Percent of universal/extended IDs in Europe tied to third-party cookies | Weeks 1-8, 2023

AAID and IDFA tied to extended IDs observed in Europe | Weeks 1-8, 2023

Group 4: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe (.01% – .125% range)

The dogfight continues amongst LiveRamp’s identityLink, Britepool, and pubcommon. Netid.de continues to lead the fourth group of the top 10.

Group 3: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe (.75% – .25% range)

Group 2: some of the higher volume IDs in Europe (2% – 6% range)

A group of 1,the leader: weekly performance of the adsrvr.org extended/universal ID (The Trade Desk)

 

February 27, 2023 release (Week #7)

In this update:

• percent of ad requests that use ANY of the universal/extended IDs
• a magnifying glass look at third-party cookies, Google Advertising ID and Apple IDFA usage as tied to universal/extended IDs
• the top 10 extended/universal IDs in Europe

Graph H: Percent of ad requests that have ANY of the universal/extended IDs included in it | Weeks 1-7, 2023

A slight increase over the last several weeks.

Percent of universal/extended IDs in Europe tied to third-party cookies | Weeks 1-7, 2023

Third-party cookies still dominate, and will probably continue to do so until at least next year.

AAID and IDFA tied to extended IDs observed in Europe | Weeks 1-7, 2023

A slight decline of AAID (Google’s Advertising ID) and Apple’s IDFA over the last several weeks.

The leader: weekly performance of the adsrvr.org extended/universal ID (The Trade Desk) | Weeks 1-7, 2023

The Trade Desk’s UID1.0 continues its dominance in Europe.

Group 2: some of the higher volume IDs in Europe (2% – 6% range)

We’ve been watching the EU universal/extended IDs for a while now, and we can see certain groupings in the top 10. Here is group #2, which consists of ID5, pubcid.org, and Criteo.

Group 3: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe (.75% – .25% range)

Group 4: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe (.01% – .125% range)

There is a dogfight amongst LiveRamp’s identityLink (RampID), Britepool, and pubcommon.

February 20, 2023 release (Week #6)

In this update:

• a magnifying glass look at third-party cookies, Google Advertising ID (new data point) and Apple IDFA usage
• a new record for ad requests that have ANY of the universal/extended IDs included in it
• the top extended/universal IDs, 1-10 (check out netID)

% of universal/extended IDs in Europe tied to third-party cookies  |  Weeks 1-6, 2023

You can see a gradual increase over the last several weeks.

AAID and IDFA tied to extended IDs observed in Europe  |  Weeks 1-6, 2023

A slight decline of AAID (Google’s Advertising ID) and Apple’s IDFA over the last several weeks.

Graph H: Percent of ad requests that have ANY of the universal/extended IDs included in it | Weeks 1-6, 2023

A new record — 33.99%

The leader: weekly performance of the adsrvr.org extended/universal ID (The Trade Desk) | Weeks 1-6, 2023 

adsrvr.org trended slightly higher in Week #6.

Group 2: some of the higher volume IDs in Europe

Here are the extended/universal IDs that are following adsrvr.org. All three trended slightly higher in Week #6.

 

Group 3: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe

Here is the third group, falling near .5%.

Group 4: some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe

Here are the IDs that came in 7th through 10th place. You can see another significant uptick for netID and a close competition between LiveRamp’s identityLink, Britepool, The Trade Desk’s tdid (commonly known as UID1.0) and pubcommon.

February 13, 2023 release

In this update:

• types of deterministic data tied to extended IDs (it hasn’t been displayed here in a while)
• a magnifying glass look at IDFA usage
• Percent of ad requests that have ANY of the universal/extended IDs included in it.
• weekly performance of the adsrvr.org (The Trade Desk’s UID1.0)
• added week #5 of 2023 to the weekly view of the higher volume IDs in Europe (first to tenth place, note the IDFV trend)

Graph B: Types of deterministic data tied to extended IDs observed in Europe  |  Weeks 1-5, 2023

You can see that third-party cookies continue to dominate as the “type” of extended ID. And below Graph B is a magnifying glass look at IDFA in Graph J…

 

Graph J:  % of All ad requests with an IDFA Attached  |  Final week of 2022 – week 5 of 2023

Ad requests with IDFA attached have decreased over the last several weeks.

 

Graph H: Percent of ad requests that have ANY of the universal/extended IDs included in it.

At the moment it’s hovering around the low-to-mid-30% range.

Graph G: weekly performance of the adsrvr.org extended/universal ID (The Trade Desk)

adsrvr.org (and tdid, see below) both refer to UID1.0 (Universal ID 1.0) by The Trade Desk, and remains quite popular in Europe. Remember that the data inputs for the updates were recently changed. So this is the percent of ALL ad requests that have an adsrvr.org ID attached.

Graph E2: a view of the first 5 weeks of 2023. Some of the higher volume IDs in Europe

Note that in previous updates we were not able to get an accurate representation of coverage for ID5-sync.com, but that was fixed in last week’s update. These IDs came in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place.

Graph E3: a view of the first 5 weeks of 2023. Some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe

After Criteo and before netID we have Apple’s IDFV and quantcast.com’s IDs. These IDs came in 5th and 6th place.

Graph E: a view of the first 5 weeks of 2023. Some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe

Here are the IDs that came in 7th through 10th place. A slight uptick in tdid (The Trade Desk’s Universal ID 1.0) and pubcommon stays consistent.

February 7, 2023 release

Let’s take a look at some different views of the data…

As you know, not every single ad request has an extended ID attached to it. So the question becomes, what percent of the total ad requests actually includes an extended ID?

Here is a look at the numbers over the last several weeks. Graph H (below) is the percent of ad requests that have ANY of the extended IDs included in it. At the moment it’s hovering around the mid-30% range.

Who won last week’s extended ID race? Here are the week #4 of 2023 results:

Again, the below is based on *all* ad requests that we see. Of course we do not see every single ad request that took place in Europe, but we see a lot of them! In the chart below, adsrvr.org ID (The Trade Desk) was attached to 22% of the ad requests.

adsrvr.org (The Trade Desk)			22.27%
id5-sync.com			4.88%
pubcid.org			2.98%
criteo.com			1.55%
IDFV (Apple)			0.57%
quantcast.com			0.47%
netid.de			0.10%
identitylink (Live Ramp)			0.03%
tdid (The Trade Desk)			0.02%
pubcommon			0.01%

Graph E: a weekly view of the month of January, 2023. Some of the higher volume IDs in Europe | Updated with Jan. 2023 ad requests

Here are the IDs that came in 7th through 10th place.

Graph E2: a weekly view of the month of January, 2023. Some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe

Note that we changed the data input for the graph. Now we’re looking at ad requests instead of the number of IDs. We weren’t able to get an accurate count for ID5-sync.com, but now we can accurately represent it since we switched to all-ad-requests. These IDs came in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place, respectively.

Graph G: a weekly view of the month of January, 2023 for adsrvr.org (The Trade Desk)

The Trade Desk’s extended ID adsrvr.org dominates the extended ID race for January 2023. It’s all alone in 1st place.

Graph E3: a weekly view of the month of January, 2023. Some more of the higher volume IDs in Europe

After Criteo and before netID we have Apple’s IDFV and quantcast.com’s IDs. These IDs came in 5th and 6th place.

January 16, 2023 release

In this update, we do have some insights into why netid.de jumped late last year.

In the December 13, 2022 update we noted that netid.de saw a ~80% increase from October to November 2022. The trend continued through the end of the year, resulting in a ~ 7x increase (!).

We talked to some netID insiders and they told us that after they release their ID into the advertising ecosystem, the Publishers have a number of options of what they can do with the ID, and that could include rotating IDs and encryption. They did share that they DO NOT have 42M users signed up for netID.de (although they do have quite a sizable user base) so clearly, in some cases, we are seeing multiple IDs that represent the same user.

Furthermore, our data scientist did notice that since November, there was a significant increase in extra netID external IDs for AAID (Android) and IDFA (Apple). Before, netID was only connected to third-party cookies. There were zero IDFA-linked netIDs prior to October, along with a statistically insignificant number of Android-linked IDs.

Graph B: Extended IDs by sub-type (netid.de view)

 

January 9, 2023 release

Graph E: a monthly view of some of the higher volume IDs in Europe | Updated with Dec. 2022 numbers

 

–> NetID continues its climb, BritePool makes a surprise jump, identityLink made a small increase in December.

 

Graph A: monthly view of the top four IDs by volume for Europe

–> adsrvr.org (The Trade Desk’s ID) continues their climb, Criteo trends downwards for the last couple of months, Quantcast is steady and pubcid.org increased in December. Note that the ID5 ID data was excluded from the report because we can’t get a precise number of how many people are represented by the ID5 IDs listed in the bidstream (due to their encrypting strategy).

 

Graph G: notable ID for the month is parrable.com

–> parrable.com’s volumes do not place it in the top 8, but the ID has seen some interesting movement this year.

 

December 13, 2022 release

 

Graph E: a monthly view of some of the higher volume IDs in Europe

Graph F: a weekly view of netid.de (October to December, 2022)

Graph A: monthly view of the top four IDs by volume for Europe

• Note that in Graph E, netid.de saw a ~80% increase from October to November. We have some hypotheses, but we’ll wait to hear it from the good folks at netid.de first. Stay tuned!
• Graph F shows netid.de’s increase in a weekly view.
• Graph A shows the top four IDs by volume. Note that the ID5 ID data was from the report because we can’t get a precise number of how many people are represented by ID5 IDs listed in the bidstream (due to the encrypting strategy). We plan to add ID5 back in a future update when we look at the number of bid requests per identifier that we see in a given time period.
• Graph A shows that Criteo ID saw a 11% decrease from October to November.
• Graph A shows that adsrvr ID (The Trade Desk) increased 21% from September to November.
• Graph A shows that the top 4 IDs by volume remained unchanged:  adsrvr/TheTrade Desk, criteo.com, pubcid.org (Prebid), and quantcast.com. 
  

Observations and pontifications

• Extended IDs (also called Universal IDs or Hashed Email tokens) are trending up and to the right, averaging a 23% increase. We expect the trend to continue.
• Obviously the deterministic data set is dominated by third-party cookies.
• Note that a Publisher can set 20 third-party cookies per page/per user if they like, and we would see them all in the bidstream.
• Mobile advertising identifiers are limited to one at a time.
• There are more publishers using Prebid (pubcid.org) right now. Prebid allows publishers to use more than one identifier on the same page at the same time.
• Why use several different IDs at once? Big publishers are probably covering their bets to make sure their inventory is being used.
• The so-called third-party cookie apocalypse didn’t happen, it’s postponed until 2023, perhaps longer, so identity providers are using third-party cookies and syncs extensively as long as they’re available.
• Yes, third-party cookies are being used to prepare for the cookie apocalypse.
• All of these identity providers are using third-party cookies as a crutch to get their ID out there before they’re deprecated in Google Chrome.
• No one knows who will win the identifier competition. Right now it makes sense to work with several at a time just in case.
• It appears that the publisher ID problem in mobile is not being solved with a single or small group of universal IDs.

There are three main buckets of identifiers:

#1 – Bucket A: Partner and time stamp encrypted, which is helpful for capturing revenue for the provider. They’re designed to make the advertiser pay [and why not, money makes the world go ‘round.]

#2 – Bucket B: Partner specific encryption. Think UID 2.0 in the US (not yet available in the EU), and NetID in Germany. The design is focused on user privacy protection.

#3 – Bucket C: Unencrypted IDs. Think Lotame’s Panorama or Criteo. Why do they offer an unencrypted ID? In Criteo’s case, they want to use it themselves! They don’t care if others use it. They want to bid on ads and they do a lot of it. The other reason for an unencrypted ID is that the provider wants to give the internet a transactable currency. If you leave it unencrypted, then maybe it’ll drive usage.

The full list of identifiers observed in the European bidstream:

33 Across.com
adnews.com
adobe.com
adserver.org
aol.com
beeswax.com
britepool.com
identitylink
idfv.roq.ad
invibes.com
krux.com
mediamath.com
nestid.de
neustar.biz
parrable.com
pubcommon
pubmatic.com
rubiconproject.com
sharedid.org
smartadserver.com
sovr.com
tdid

 

Now you have a front-row seat to the tracker and we’ll keep an eye on these trends week to week. I think we can all agree that it will be interesting to revisit a few months from now to see how the tides are turning.

We expect to see more techniques that are preparation for the big cookie apocalypse, similar to what we’re seeing with pubcid.org and publishers using multiple identifiers per page.
Accordingly, we expect to see some movement in data volumes amongst the identifier providers. The top 5 by volume probably won’t change in the near term, but the next 10 could see some movement.

 

If you’re ready to have a conversation about including Roqad’s graph in your identity spine, give us a shout.

December 6, 2022 update

You’ve already seen the June to October 2022 launch data. Now, we’re breaking things down by week, going back to week 41, which is October 9 to 16 (Sunday to Sunday), and through week 47, which is November 20 to 26.

 

Graph C: Extended IDs observed in the Europe – Week # 41-47, 2022. The top three IDs by volume.

 

Graph C shows extended IDs (also called universal IDs, also called hashed email tokens) from October through most of November, 2022 across the European market.

The three most prominent identifiers by volume are:

adsrvr.org (TheTrade Desk) –  1.8 B
criteo.com – 1.3 B
pubcid.org (Prebid) – 995 M

Notes on Graph C

• The top three are the same companies that we saw in the previous November 18 post (see above). It will be interesting to check in with the volumes after the holiday shopping season.
• The ID5 ID actually ranks pretty high in volumes, but we do not have an accurate count at this time because of their encryption set-up. The exact same ID can appear several times in a different form but we cannot tell since we do not have the “key” to unlock it. So, we are leaving it out of the graph at this time. See above for a longer explanation.
• Pubcid.org ranks high in volume because of their feature of allowing multiple IDs on a single web page. Publishers can use multiple IDs to hedge their bets as there is no one ID that (at this time) “rules them all.” Next year should be an interesting one for the ID race. See above for a longer explanation.
• Overall, the extended IDs (aka universal IDs aka hashed email tokens) are trending up and to the right. Why? See above for a longer explanation.

Now take a look at Graph D. We didn’t show this view in our launch data – here we see the NEXT four IDs by volume. It was awkward to put them all in one graph as there is a big drop off between number three and number four.

Graph D: Extended IDs observed in Europe – Week # 41-47,  2022. The NEXT four.

The “next” five:

quantcast.com – 112 M
netid.de – 22 M
identityLink – 20 M
britepool.com – 17 M
pubcommon – 12 M

Notes on Graph D

• identityLink is operated by LiveRamp.
• Re: the “Britepool” ID. Britepool merged with bigtoken.com in 2021. Apparently they kept the original Britepool ID name. BigToken actually has an interesting product concept. From their website: You can use the BIGtoken application to manage your digital data and identity and earn rewards when your data is purchased. Third-party applications and sites access BIGtoken to learn more about their consumers and earn revenue from data sales made through their platforms.
• I asked our VP of Sales, Alasdair Cross, for his impressions of Graph C and D. He said, “It’s surprising how quickly NetID has grown, increasing over 300% in the last 2 weeks. It looks like the publisher consortium of Web.de, RTL, ProsiebenSat, 1and1 and others are rapidly pushing the ID out to their customers.”

 

November 18, 2022 release

➜ Graph A: European Universal IDs  observed in the bidstream  |  June – October 2022

* We removed this data from the report because we can’t get a precise number of how many people are represented by ID5 IDs listed in the bidstream (due to the encrypting strategy). We plan to add ID5 back in a future update when we look at the number of bid requests per identifier that we see in a given time period.

 

Roqad has a front row seat to the European Universal ID  landscape (among others), and while we can’t speak for every single bid transaction, we have a pretty good view of what is happening.

 

We’ll be posting updates on a weekly basis, so don’t forget to sign up for post alerts above.

Graph A shows extended IDs (also called universal IDs, also called hashed email tokens) from June to October, 2022 across the European market.

We’ll get into the deterministic data points that these identifiers are tied to shortly.

The most prominent identifiers by volume are:

adsrvr.org (TheTrade Desk) – 1.1 B
criteo.com – 870 M
pubcid.org (Prebid) – 626 M
quantcast.com – 67 M

Note that we don’t have a horse in the race so to speak, we don’t have a favorite or even a preferred identifier. We basically just collect and connect them via an identity graph.

This makes us a great resource for these trends. A source of truth. No bias.

Most of the identifiers come from DSPs. Scroll down for the full list.

Obviously the extended IDs (aka universal IDs aka hashed email tokens) are trending up and to the right, an average increase of 23% among the top five.

Why?

Before we get into our explanations, take a look at Graph B. Here are the types of deterministic data to which the above identifiers are tied.

 

➜ Graph B: Types of deterministic data tied to extended IDs observed in the European bidstream  |  June – October 2022

As always, if you’re ready to explore an id-agnostic solution for your identity spine, contact us. We’ll be back with more next week.

References

https://docs.prebid.org/overview/intro-to-header-bidding.html

https://github.com/prebid/Shared-id-v2

https://www.publift.com/blog/bidstream-data

https://bigtoken.com/faq/#general_0