The third-party cookie is not dead. It has been pardoned. And that is exactly why it is worth less today than when it was on death row.<\/p>\n
On 22 April 2025<\/strong>, Google announced it would not deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome after all, and that it would not launch the long-promised user choice prompt: everything stays as it is, with preferences buried inside the browser’s privacy settings. Six months later, on 17 October 2025<\/strong>, came the second half of the announcement \u2014 the one almost nobody commented on. Google retired ten of the Privacy Sandbox APIs, including Topics, Protected Audience and Attribution Reporting. Deprecation started with Chrome 144 in January 2026, full removal arrived with Chrome 150 in July. The cookie’s replacement no longer exists. The cookie does.<\/p>\n Anyone reading this sequence as good news for traditional ad-tech has only read the first line. What actually happened is that the market was left with an identifier that survives out of inertia, with no infrastructure ready to replace it. Meanwhile, the most valuable part of addressable data had already moved elsewhere.<\/p>\n For twenty years digital marketing has worked on rented data. The tenant used it, the landlord \u2014 the browser, the platform, the identity provider \u2014 could change the terms of the lease whenever it wanted. That is exactly what has happened, repeatedly, from 2020 to today, with the tenant never getting a say. First-party is the difference between renting and owning: it costs more at the door, nobody can take it away from you, and it appreciates while everything else depreciates.<\/p>\n This, in my view, is the lens through which the pricing of sports properties should be reread over the next two years. And MotoGP, in that rereading, is the most underpriced item on the list.<\/p>\n Third-party cookies were already structurally compromised long before Google’s U-turn.<\/p>\n Firefox has blocked third-party tracking cookies by default since September 2019<\/strong> with Enhanced Tracking Protection, and since June 2022<\/strong> has extended isolation to all cookies with Total Cookie Protection. Safari has blocked all<\/strong> third-party cookies by default since March 2020<\/strong>. The GDPR (2018) and the post-Brexit UK-GDPR require explicit consent for any tracking that is not strictly necessary.<\/p>\n And here is the point almost nobody puts on the table in budget meetings: there is no reliable consent rate to build a plan on<\/strong>. I have spent time looking for one, and the serious measurements diverge brutally. Benchmarks from European consent management platforms place the media sector among the highest, above 60% opt-in. Independent measurements put rates anywhere from 4% to 85%, depending on banner design, country and measurement method. Anyone who hands you a single flat figure as “the” market consent rate is selling a certainty the data does not contain, and I have no intention of adding another one.<\/p>\n Which, for media buyers, is the worse of the two pieces of news. Add up Safari users, Firefox users, Chrome opt-outs and refused consent: the real sample is a long way from the theoretical universe sold in slide decks, and nobody can tell you precisely by how much. The cookie survives technically. It does not survive strategically.<\/p>\n The practical result, under way for three to four years now, is that valuable addressable data has moved inside properties that collect consent directly and own the relationship with the user. On that map, the major sports championships occupy a privileged position by construction: millions of logged-in users, an emotional relationship that works in favour of consent rather than against it, a relationship that repeats season after season. They are among the few scaled sources of consented data still growing in a market where everything else is declining.<\/p>\n Before talking about activation, we need to be precise about what MotoGP actually captures. And one common assumption needs correcting straight away, one I hear repeated often: that MotoGP’s digital operation was born after Formula 1’s. It was not. Formula 1 launched F1 TV Pro in May 2018<\/strong>; motogp.com’s subscription service had already been selling full seasons to direct subscribers for several years before that. What is younger is not the product. It is its monetisation \u2014 and for a buyer that is the point that matters, because it means the value is still priced as if it were yesterday.<\/p>\n The set of proprietary touchpoints today runs across four layers, and they are not equivalent.<\/p>\n VideoPass<\/strong> is the global streaming platform. Logged-in users, consumption data, session preferences, consented geolocation, device data. It is the richest touchpoint for profiling because the relationship is continuous across the whole season.<\/p>\n TimingPass<\/strong> is the live-timing-only service, without video. A smaller and qualitatively different segment: the technical fan, the one who watches the sector times. For a brand with an engineering positioning it is the most valuable segment in the entire portfolio, and it is also the one nobody asks for at the negotiating table.<\/p>\n The MotoGP app<\/strong>, relaunched in February 2026 as a single access point \u2014 live video, live timing, live tracking, minute-by-minute blog \u2014 builds the relationship with the more casual fan. High volume, lower depth per user, but it is the scale that feeds lookalike models.<\/p>\n Ticketing and hospitality<\/strong>, through the circuits’ own properties and affiliated sales systems, are the layer that touches actual behaviour: who actually goes to the Grands Prix, how often, at what spend, in which countries. It is also the most fragmented layer, because every circuit has historically had its own collection logic. The documented piece is the exclusive partnership with Quint on premium hospitality, which brings the top segment of the audience inside a single channel. On unifying the whole layer, though, I want to be blunt, because it is the point where I see the most loose talk around: this is not an objective MotoGP Sports Entertainment Group has ever stated publicly<\/strong>. The declared priorities are geographic expansion, commercialising the show, digital innovation and fan engagement. That unifying ticketing data is the operational prerequisite for three of those four items is our reading. I am giving it to you as exactly that.<\/p>\n The 2025 season, closed out in December, is the one the business case should be built on.<\/p>\n Global fanbase at 632 million, up 12% on 2024. Over 60 million followers across social channels, with a 61% engagement rate. More than one billion minutes consumed on the official YouTube channel. 3.6 million spectators at the circuits, with an all-time record of 311,797 attendees at Le Mans in May. TV audience up 9% on average per Grand Prix, and Sprints up 26%.<\/strong> For the fifth consecutive year, more than half of fans are under 35.<\/p>\n The first quarter of 2026 \u2014 MotoGP’s first accounts consolidated by Liberty Media \u2014 saw revenue grow 25% to $94 million, with primary revenue up from $64 million to $83 million. It is the trajectory of a property that is building, not harvesting.<\/p>\n The 61% engagement rate is the number I would look at first if I were a CIO. Not because it is high in absolute terms, but because it is the only measurable proxy for willingness to consent: MotoGP does not publish its own opt-in rates \u2014 no championship does \u2014 and in the absence of the direct figure, the quality of the relationship is the best available approximation. Ask for it at the negotiating table. It is one of the questions a property still under construction will still answer.<\/p>\n One piece of context is worth more than many projections. On 17 October 2025<\/strong> Apple signed an exclusive five-year deal with Formula One Group for F1 streaming rights in the United States from 2026. The parties have never made the figures official: the press reports over $700 million in total<\/strong>, with the highest estimates at $750 million, i.e. $140-150 million a year<\/strong> against the $85-90 million paid until then by ESPN. Immediate operational effect: F1 TV Pro was pulled from the US market \u2014 annual sales closed from 17 October, renewals from 17 November, monthly plans from 8 December.<\/p>\n My reading is that this is a commercially rational and strategically revealing move. F1’s American fanbase grew to 52 million in 2024, up 10.5%<\/strong>, according to Nielsen Sports data \u2014 not the championship’s own corporate communications, a distinction worth keeping. On that basis, the absolute value of the Apple deal justifies partly giving up the direct relationship with the US subscriber. But the signal is clear: F1 has reached the phase where its own first-party data is worth more sold wholesale to an aggregator than cultivated in-house.<\/p>\n MotoGP is in the opposite phase. Liberty Media closed the acquisition of roughly 84% of Dorna Sports on 3 July 2025<\/strong>, at an enterprise value of \u20ac4.2 billion, and in February 2026 renamed the company MotoGP Sports Entertainment Group. MotoGP’s first-party cycle is still under construction, not in early monetisation. It is the same reading we apply in Liberty’s MotoGP roadmap<\/a>, applied here to one specific asset.<\/p>\n There is a limit here that needs stating, though, one I do not find in most of the analysis out there. The MotoGP 2027-2031 commercial agreements<\/a> \u2014 what the press calls the “Concorde Agreement” by analogy with F1, even though that is not the official name \u2014 have been signed by all five constructors and the eleven teams, cover the cycle through to 2031 with an option to 2036, and keep a fixed amount of around \u20ac8 million a year rather than the percentage of revenue the teams had asked for. MGPSEG is asking teams to strengthen communication and marketing as a strategic area, but promotional and marketing responsibilities remain among the aspects still to be defined<\/strong>. And no public document links those agreements to a data-unification plan: anyone who tells you otherwise is interpreting, not quoting.<\/p>\n That is not a gap in the agreement. It is the contractual space where the real data game will be played, and it is open right now. Whoever enters now negotiates inside a framework that is still being written. Whoever enters in 2028 negotiates inside a framework written by someone else.<\/p>\n Three mistakes, and I see them repeat with a regularity that has stopped surprising me.<\/p>\n The first is confusing first-party data with audience impressions.<\/strong> They are different things. An impression is how many times your brand has been seen: it is flow, exposure, awareness. First-party data is a customer record: who they are, what they consume, when, how they segment, what can be predicted. A brand that pays for a title slot for the impressions has optimised an exposure metric; one that pays for it to access the audience file has optimised a CRM metric. They are justified on different maths, and need sign-off from different functions within the business.<\/p>\n The second is thinking sports data is exempt from the privacy dynamics hitting the rest of the web.<\/strong> It is not. GDPR consent applies to data collected on VideoPass just as it does on any other touchpoint, and the quality of the consent management determines the quality of the segment that can actually be activated. A partner who genuinely wants to use this data needs to understand the consent cycle, the boundaries on cross-brand use, the limits on international transfers. It is serious technical work, and it is no accident that it is the kind of work a CIO judges better than a CMO. Which is why this conversation should be on IT’s agenda, not just marketing’s.<\/p>\n The third is assuming the data comes bundled with the contract.<\/strong> It does not. If access to segments, refresh frequency and usage rights are not written into the sponsorship contract, the partner ends up with the visibility they bought<\/a> and nothing else. It is the same principle by which a tech brand that gets MotoGP right<\/a> buys the software running in production, not the demo for the keynote.<\/p>\n For the CIO or CMO evaluating a motorsport package with a data component today, the operating framework we use runs across three levels.<\/p>\n First: CRM enrichment.<\/strong> The partner accesses derived segments to enrich its own internal CRM \u2014 not a transfer of identifying data, but segmentation the partner uses to activate campaigns against its own existing database. It is the level with the lightest privacy implications, and the only one realistically activatable within the first twelve months of a deal.<\/p>\n Second: lookalike modelling.<\/strong> The partner uses aggregated profiles to build lookalike models on other channels \u2014 publishers, walled gardens, DSPs \u2014 reaching audiences that resemble the consented fans but are acquired elsewhere. It is the level with the greatest leverage on reach. There are figures circulating for the value multiplier over the first level that I have never seen documented by a reliable public source, so I do not use them: the gain is real, its quantification has to be done case by case on the partner’s actual CPM, not on a factor lifted from a slide.<\/p>\n Third: direct addressable activation.<\/strong> Campaigns activated directly on proprietary channels \u2014 email, VideoPass push notifications, editorial integrations \u2014 with segment targeting. It is the most delicate level on privacy and brand safety, requires the greatest operational maturity in the partner, and generates the highest value per impression because it lands where the fan is already engaged.<\/p>\n The three levels are not alternatives: they are a ladder. For a partner coming in with a title package, the serious conversation covers all three, and writes them into the contract alongside category exclusivity<\/a>.<\/p>\nTwenty years of renting<\/h2>\n
Why the cookie survives technically but not strategically<\/h2>\n
What MotoGP actually captures today, layer by layer<\/h2>\n
The numbers that make this audience an asset, not a crowd<\/h2>\n
The F1 signal: you sell the direct relationship when you can monetise it<\/h2>\n
What almost everyone gets wrong<\/h2>\n
Three levels of activation, in order of difficulty<\/h2>\n