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This is not a direct market catalyst, but it is a signal that the consumer privacy stack is still being actively priced and managed at the browser/site level. The economic implication is that first-party data, consent flows, and identity resolution remain valuable moats; any platform or publisher with weak login density will see monetization decay faster than peers because opt-out users are the highest-value audience to target but also the hardest to re-aggregate.

Second-order, this reinforces a bifurcation between adtech winners that can operate on probabilistic or contextual signals and losers dependent on deterministic third-party tracking. Over the next 6-18 months, the pressure will show up less in headline ad spend and more in CPM dispersion: brands will increasingly pay up for inventory with authenticated audiences, while open-web remnant supply becomes structurally lower quality and more susceptible to price compression.

The contrarian angle is that privacy fatigue can create a false sense of resilience for legacy ad platforms: the user opt-out rate is often a leading indicator of monetization leakage that arrives with a lag. If consent rates continue drifting down, the surprise will be margin degradation at publishers and intermediaries rather than an immediate revenue collapse, which makes this a slow-burn short rather than a clean event trade.