Today we had a discussion with NedStat about their product SiteStat about the acceptance of 3rd party cookies. NedStat uses 3rd party cookies for tracking visits to their customers’ sites and does not offer a solution for usage of 1st party cookies. The question wether NedStat thinks this will be an issue in the near feature got an negative answer.
A rather old report from WebTrends (May 23 2005) explains us that we have to take this serious;
WebTrends top-level findings indicate that across all industries, average third-party cookie rejection rates have increased more than four-fold in the last 16-months, from 2.84 percent of web site visitors in January 2004 to 12.4 percent in April 2005. The growth in this trend has leveled off since January 2005, and seems to have been primarily fueled by software that blocks third-party cookies, including personal firewalls, proxy servers, and available settings in the Windows XP Service Pack 2 release of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Though the cookie rejection rate will be between 10-15% now, we should take this serious and move to 1st party cookies in my opinion.
http://www.webtrends.com/CookieRejection
www.omtrends.com
