Ad tech stocks surge as Google delays killing third-party cookies until 2023

Ad tech stocks surged Thursday after Google said it was pushing back its timeline to kill third-party tracking cookies from 2022 to 2023, giving the digital advertising industry more time to plan for more privacy-conscious targeted ads. 

Several ad tech players saw stocks shoot up Thursday following the announcement. The Trade Desk shares were up 16%, Magnite shares were up nearly 10%, PubMatic shares were up more than 13%, Criteo shares were up more than 12% and LiveRamp shares were up more than 6%.

Cookies are small pieces of code that websites deliver to a visitor's browser and stick around as the person visits other sites. They can be used to track users across multiple sites to target ads and see how they perform. Google said last year it would end support for those cookies in Chrome by early 2022 once it figured out how to address the needs of users, publishers and advertisers and come up with tools to mitigate workarounds.

"While there's considerable progress with this initiative, it's become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right," Vinay Goel, Director of Privacy Engineering at Chrome, wrote in a blog post. 

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