Digital-advertising stocks are rallying Thursday after Alphabet Inc.'s
GOOG,
+0.56%
GOOGL,
+0.41%
Google said it would delay its plans to phase out third-party cookies that track users across the web. U.S.-listed shares of Criteo SA [s; CRTO] are up more than 12% in Thursday's session, while shares of The Trade Desk Inc.
TDD
are up 13% and shares of PubMatic Inc.
PUBM,
+10.52%
are up more than 8%. Google now plans to phase out cookies on its Chrome browser in a third-month period that will end in late 2023, whereas the company initially was targeting early 2022. The new schedule will give the company more time to work with industry players on devising new privacy "standards" and "is important to avoid jeopardizing the business models of many web publishers which support freely available content," Google said in a blog post. Alphabet shares are up 0.5% in Thursday morning trading and they've gained 71% over the past 12 months as the S&P 500
SPX,
+0.55%
has increased 40%.