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November 5, 2007
Will a "Do Not Track" List Just Encourage More Ads?
Business Week wonders if the recently proposed "Do Not Track" list won't devalue advertising so badly that the volume of ads on sites with no obvious demographic to pitch to advertisers will have to increase:
'Do Not Track' Could Backfire:
"The reason for the potential ad increase is related to a key difference between telemarketing and online advertising. When individual consumers add their names to the Do Not Call Registry, they stop receiving sales phone calls altogether. Web surfers who join the proposed Do Not Track list, however, would still see online ads, just not ads targeted specifically to them. Ad networks argue that, because targeting increases ad prices, each ad seen by those on the list would be cheaper than ads seen by people not on the list. Thus, a Web site probably would have to show more ads to compensate for the loss of revenue from targeted ads.
"'The value of advertising on the Internet would drop because you couldn't say, 'This is a finance person. Let me show them a finance ad,'' says Tim Vanderhook, chief executive of Specific Media, one of the largest privately held behaviorally targeted ad networks. 'So the only way to make as much money is a) make them pay or b) show them more ads.'"
The article goes on to say that few people really worry about the privacy implications of behavioral targeting anyhow, then features Philip Kaplan of AdBrite who says "Privacy is an old man's concern ... Look at what kids are putting on the Internet these days ... who they are married to, who their friends are, what they do."
Right. "Kids" do all sorts of stuff "old men" don't for several reasons that might include 1. the fact that old men are boring, 2. old men are scared, or 3. kids have no idea why the stupid stuff they do is stupid until it bites them on the ass. Hard. At which point they file class actions suits against the ponytails who've made their money wandering around downplaying the very real implications of a Web that's effectively bugged by Madison Avenue.
People like Kaplan act as if "being tracked" is what's objectionable to people who bother to object, as opposed to the consequences we face when the entities doing the tracking screw up and spill personally identifiable information all over the Internet, which they do quite a bit and will only continue to do with increasing frequency.
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Tags: privacy, advertising
Posted by mhall at 7:47 PM | Add Comment
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