Google’s Gemini has weighed in on how much the adtech industry may have lost on the essentially now-defunct Privacy Sandbox — and the number isn’t small.
According to Gemini, who we asked to estimate how much money the adtech industry spent to adopt Google Privacy Sandbox, the global ecosystem likely poured “hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars” into the project over five years before Google recently abandoned it.
Why It Matters:
The estimate underscores the financial and innovation toll that Google’s shifting Sandbox strategy has had on the broader advertising ecosystem. Many DSPs, SSPs, measurement vendors, and more, spent years building, testing, and maintaining integrations for APIs like Topics and Protected Audience — work that has now largely been written off as sunk cost.
Experts React:
Here’s some more on what Gemini, our expert in this case, said:
“The cumulative investment across the thousands of companies that make up the global adtech ecosystem… is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars over the five or more years the initiative was in development,” the AI wrote.
“One adtech executive estimated the full-scale support for the Sandbox could demand up to 8,000 days of effort over three years for a single company.”
Gemini’s analysis also highlighted the “opportunity cost” of the initiative — including “diverted innovation” and “wasted effort” from companies forced to focus on compliance with Google’s constantly evolving specs. Obviously, that money could have been used for other things. In fact, on that, Gemini said that “the value of the resources foregone by choosing to invest in the Privacy Sandbox—is arguably the more damaging and less recoverable expense for the adtech industry.”
Our Take:
Google’s own AI has now offered a fairly sobering reflection on the challenges of and costs tied to its privacy experiment. Whether you view Privacy Sandbox as an ambitious test or a very expensive lesson, the takeaway is that when a company with Google’s scale shifts course, the ripple effects are pretty meaningful.
