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Doubleclick Exits The Ad-Tracking Business

Posted by timothy on from the these-things-travel-in-packs dept.

Masem writes: "Cnet is reporting that Doubleclick closed down its ad tracking program as of Dec 31 2001, and is shifting from a media company to research and development for online ventures. Doubleclick claims they had upwards of 100million unique tracking profiles at the height of their run, but with the dot-com bust and lower ad revenue rates, ad tracking ran into the red. Even after the worrisome aquition of Abacus Online (which was rumored to allow Doubleclick to connect online and offline consumer profiles), the company could not turn a buck on ad revenues. Time to remove that 'doubleclick.com 127.0.0.1' from /etc/hosts now?""

4 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Sorry, no by Codex+The+Sloth · · Score: 4, Informative

    Uh, they're not getting out of the annoying ad business, just the annoying targeted ad.

    --
    I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you ... oh wait, I'm #93427. Ha ha! In your face #93428!
  2. Re:Finally! by scott1853 · · Score: 4, Informative

    IE 6 can be setup to deny their cookies. Unfortunatelty, you can't add them to your HOSTS file because IE considers a failure to load an IFRAME document means the entire page must have failed to load.

  3. Nope, just use this hosts file by gad_zuki! · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

  4. ugh... some points by zama · · Score: 5, Informative

    DoubleClick is NOT leaving the adserving business. Just the Intelligent Targeting product. DoubleClick will still use cookies, still serve ads using targeted information (each host website can dynamically insert key-values into the ad tags for targeting purposes - demographic or behavioral information that can be targeted to).

    What DoubleClick is no longer doing is taking traffic data and putting into a big consortium to find interest segment associations and targeting. This is the exact same thing that offline marketers do - you apply for the credit card and buy a sweater at Gap, that goes into a db with your age and location and other info. That info is then contributed to a data pool which also has purchasing habits of Pottery Barn, Ikea, William Sonoma, etc. The various members in the consortium can then purchase lists of various demographics for targeted direct mailings and catalogs.

    I don't think the info is sellable - what good is someone else's cookie data? It's not like you'll be able to serve ads to a doubleclick cookie unless you somehow take over the domain. And there's no personally identifiable info in that database either.

    .bartacus