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Doubleclick Exits The Ad-Tracking Business
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?""
Finally - no more waiting for web pages to load because they got hung up on attempts to contact doubleclick!
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
This is a tragedy for fans of annoying internet advertising everywhere. Sleep well, sweet Doubleclick - we barely knew thee.
Okay, I'm over it now - when's the fire sale auction?
At the very top of the page it was a link: http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/N2613.osdn/B49638.2 ;sz=468x60;ord=101052438101052438
This is a bad joke. I will keep ad.doubleclick.net to 127.0.0.1 untill I find it on f***edcompany.com
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
Ad banners have become an overlookable feature in most web pages. I would like to see further studies in targeted advertising. I mean, I hate the outdoors, pop music and fast food. Why show me ads for places to camp, discounts on CD-NOW, and contests with McDonalds?
Click here or here.
What will happen to all the collected data? Will they sell it? Keep it? Destroy it?
How the heck am I supposed to learn about products and services that I should be interested in now?
Stefan
Hopefully this will start a trend in the downfall of web banners, popups/unders and shoshkeles. (ducks)
Don't get me wrong, I work at an Ad Agency, as their senior interactive developer, but the proliferation of advertising on the internet without supporting revenue streams has always seemed a little silly to me.
at least more common advertising mediums actually show positive ROI when executed well.
I don't care how innovative your flash banner, pop-under, or mouse trailer is, it's not going to make me more inclined to purchase your products.
True, it may build brand recognition, and increase word-of-mouth talk about a particular company or item, but where's the proof in the pudding?
Well, that's going to change. By analogy (to drag that up again), in 1981, USENET posters generally thought it would be impractical for a long time to come to put all USENET postings on the Internet. By the mid-90's, it had happened. You can bet that in the not too distant future, it will be so cheap to record and correlate all you on-line activities that no company will think twice about doing it--unless the law prevents them from doing it.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
I'm sure that DoubleClick realizes that its tracking database, and the equipment and softawre that compile it, are valuable to certain unscrupulous marketers. It therefore seems highly unlikely that they would "just" shut down. It's much more likely that they'll sell it to another unscrupulous company. I won't stop blocking them yet.... Rather, I'll prepare to block whichever company (e.g. Naviant or Donnelly) buys their tracking system.
It's "doubleclick.net", not "doubleclick.com". Also, someone forgot to close their italic tag.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Nice to see there's a business case out there now against profiling Internet users for ads. Too bad it will most likely be looked at as a fluke failure ("oh they charged too much, we'll charge less") that won't stop the practice. Doubleclick ultimately failed in this venture because they found themselves in a PR fiasco. They gave people a way to opt out, and a lot of people did it. If I was buying advertising, I wouldn't pay the extra for a service that was slammed in the news and that people could choose not to use. Doesn't mean some marketroid out there won't still think it's a great idea.
We haven't heard the last of the advertising profiles. There might be a light at the end of the tunnel, though. The decision will ultimately be decided by the Net surfers who choose to avoid intrusive advertising.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
Doubleclick claims they had upwards of 100million unique tracking profiles at the height of their run
And it's rumored to represent over 10million people!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I believe they supplied more cookies than Nabisco
http://www.kubuntu.org/
their targeted segment of advertising.
i'm willing to bet large sums of money that they will still be serving ads, just not directly at you anymore....not that you noticed the difference anyway.
Of all the dot-com failures that have happened over the last year, why couldn't DoubleClick be one of them? Why?
What really happened is that doubleclick couldn't make money in private industry, so they targetted the people who were willing to pay good money for that information. They got a multi-billion dollar contract from NSA to continue and improve their profiling, provided they stop sharing the results with anyone else. So now all their activities are highly classified, and they have established a cover, or front business, to explain why they still exist. But you didn't hear it from me... oh crap, who is that banging on my door ---- and someone's remotely taken control of my computer ---- IT'S NOT TRUE, HONEST! I MADE IT UP! I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING!!!!! AAAaaaaaaaaaa........
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Okay, after reading that article you get the impression that targetting ads based on data capture doesn't work.
First off because of the pain/cost of getting a decent level (read both accurate and large coverage) of data in the first place (e.g. i'd imagine if you were the sort who spends large amounts online frequently you would have opted out either through the regular channels or by simply ignoring all their attempts to track you)
Secondly because their clients couldn't justify the cost of buying a properly targetted ad with the return it generates (it cost approximately 400% more than the standard ad type but only gives an improved yield in the range of 200%-300% if you target it right).
When compared to regular mail advertising, banners will lose out because mail;
a) can be far more targetted/available for most demographics
b) has better coverage
c) has a better chance of being read rather than ignored, skipped or stopped by other means
d) available for most demographics
So what have we learnt from all this?
Well that dblclick may have the technology but the customers will not buy despite the promises, or perhaps the fact that the cost increase was not proportionate to the performance increase. Instead their consumers preferred to go with a random assortment of less targetted ads.
Well that's marketeers for you!
Because if I block it in /etc/hosts its gone forever, to everything. Blocking it in Mozilla will not block it if, say, you download some filesharing program that has banner ads on it, or any other program for that matter.
Liberty in your lifetime
http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
Hey, maybe they'll discover a way to make money on web content.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
There needs to be a website where people can post what they need, and then the advertisers can browse the listings and send a message about the relevant products they offer.
Nevermind, I know that would fail, it would rely too heavily on ethics and honesty.
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
Me, I can ignore banner ads, popups, popunders, and whatever is needed. I just want free content, and I don't want my name/ip address in some tracking database.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Unless you're running a webserver you can run a little fake webserver called edexter. It should time-out immediately.
http://accs-net.com/hosts/eDexter.html
"You heard me right! I want a cut of whatever you get from the people who you sell my information, and of the profits realized on sales to myself as a result of targeted advertising to same."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think they are out temporarily to conserve their cash, as they are not getting as much business as they would like to. So, it's basically a survival tactics.
As soon as the economy is back, and the online ad business is back, you can bet that they'll be back in business again.
So breathe while you can.
I fully understand that companies need to advertise to promote their products. I have no problem with seeing banner ads for ThinkGeek.com on /., for example. In fact, I'll click on the ad to help out CmdrTaco and the guys from time to time. When my meager college student budget allows it, I'll even order something. Under normal circumstances, I can click past or tune out or fast forward or whatever. Most importantly, no record is kept and no dossier is formed on me.
Not true with DCLK. "Advertising" such as what DoubleClick is doing/has done is an entirely different matter. Not only did DoubleClick seek to track individual Web users' surfing habits, they sought to match it to their offline identity and sell that information to the highest bidder. Imagine if, thanks to DCLK, your life insurance company finds out you've been visiting www.jrcigars.com and then, mysteriously, your rates go up. Yet this is EXACTLY what they were trying to do.
As for this being a "temporary" move, DoubleClick isn't coming back. Their exiting the ad-tracking business is like Ford exiting the car business. Online advertising is dead and has been for quite some time, make no mistake about it. I, for one, am happy to see them go.
Think people ... why do you have ads?
...
... ?
... (and I'm not talking Amazon here)
... there's no reason why they can't commoditise other mass market non-perishable bundles (think personal care kits, think entire kitchenware, think car personalisation). The biggest barrier to adoption has always been social ... the better micetrap doesn't work beyond a certain point. It's all about distribution, reliability, after-sales service, etc ...
... this is a directory problem. Already you see personal advertising in newspapers disappearing due to specialised employment agencies, help-desks, ... I see this trend also happening to banner-ads. People will go to specific trading sites which persists reputations rather than wanting to be inundated with services they don't need at the moment.
... the other ads that are left are the branding which are image/style based ... frankly those wish to be associated with an experience and reminding the user that you're responsible for a over-limit bandwidth bill and a waste of time is not good karma. Coke and Pepsi sponsor rock concerts not sport statistics.
... movie trailers which use products that normal people can identify with and feel part of the crowd. I can talk about social alienation in cities which lead people to identify with their professional peers rather than neighbours but this is a geek-site not socio-economic trend analysis.
To sell something
What is the most efficient market for selling stuff
If you study the nobel prize winner of a few years ago, you'd discover that dutch auctions can be theoretically proven to be the most efficient price discovery process.
Guess who's implementing auctions in a massive way?
The same group that's expanding from collectibles to cars to sports gear to CDs
Already large-scale companies are dumping overstocked or out-dated goods on eBay
OK that's the long-term killer for ads. Now what about service organisations (ie offering something other than tangible goods). The service is about finding someone to do something that you can't do yourself
So
In summary, unless there are some fundamental problems with my observations, I would say that ads as we know them (banner, etc) will become ineffective due to going under the personal threshold of normal perception. Go to a rural place and you'd really notice the *ABSENCE* of billboards. Instead you will be mor eproduct placements
In summary, IMHO pure ad-driven renue models will fail. It might have worked for the radio-broadcasting industry which requires continuous listening but unless something radical happens to social perception of the internet, the ability to jump-click outside a walled domain, and the fundamental cost-structure (ads=bandwidth=costs) I don't see them being viable.
Of course the 64 million dollar question is what is a viable business model which all the VCs would give their souls (or unmortgaged remainder thereof) to discover.
LL
so, theyve collected all the information after tracking us for years. dont need any more information, therefore, stopping tracking us.
a company that has finished business on the internet after doing what they planned? somethings not quite right...
They are getting out of the profile-tracking business, not the ad business. If you didn't notice, DoubleClick's ads are used on virtually every major web site everywhere. They aren't just going to walk away from that.
Frankly, this is barely newsworthy. I guess it's worth mentioning because it's good news for privacy advocates, but other than that, it's just "ad product gets cancelled...big whoop".
Zodiac Survey
As a marketer and a long-time heavy internet user, I think we've gone a bit far here.
There are a lot of benefits to the profiling and targeting, and the real potential for encroaching on my privacy is relatively limited. The company I work for would not exist without targeted marketing based on profiles built up on individuals.
We don't care what the person's sex/race/religion/politics are unless that data means the person is more likely to buy (and thus is intersted in our product). Even if we had that kind of information, we're a business.
Think about it from the other side: do I need to see ads for products I'll never buy? I'd much rather people give me offers and deals that match things I already buy. It's more useful to me.
You won't get there from here without targeting. This targeting gives us free (network) TV/sports/etc. It supports magazines we subscribe to at $1 an issue instead of $5. It supports websites we read, including this one. Slashdot is pretty obvious targeting, but CNN.com?
I do believe there's an important balance, but still -- we shouldn't be rejoicing about this.
Flame away.
Except then Amazon has a fit because you might, theoretically, possibly order a product from clicking there. =P
-Corvidae
Ahh, but what if it's a trick specially *designed* to make us remove the ads.doubleclick entry from our personal blackhole lists? I can see it now. Four months from now, they'll announce their return to user-tracking, and will in fact have continued to track all us innocent users the whole time! :-)
*lol*
Zarchon
here is a really comprehensive hosts file that blocks morpheus,bearshare,hotline and 11,000 advert servers, daily updates, instructions and works on all platforms including Linux/beos/macs/win ;)
Doubleclick is failing because ads on the internet are failing in general. Why? Because there is more advertising than there is cash flow to justify it. Too many companies and individuals are sporting banner ads to make a few bucks, while depleting the ad resources that would better go to the websites that could really use it. Of course, its all a matter of supply and demand.
To be effective, you need a LOT of ecommerce sites. And you need a LOT of people conducting business through those sites. However, while 50% of Americans might be using the internet, you can bet that 50% of all retail purchases are not conducted through it. You have an excessive amount of consumers not actually spending money to support online businesses, but still "consuming" the free products that are being funded somewhat indirectly by those same businesses. Imagine if all the customers of a grocery store came in to take only the free samples and left.
Also, the average online consumer is less affected by online ads than their equivilant counterpart in meatspace is. The brainwashed masses who watch primetime TV every night are more influenced by the 33% of their TV watching experience, which is comprised of commercials. It also helps that generally speaking, most commercials are actually advertising products that people will use, instead of porn sites and pyramid schemes. Yes, I realize not all banner ads are about these things, but most of the spam we get is, and this spam reflects in the minds of the consumers in much the same way. Once they realize they're being suckered, all online advertising is seen in the same light.
What ends up happening, is we have a much smaller percentage of online consumers who are easily influenced by ads of any sort, yet those consumers are still consuming the free material supported by those very ads.
Targeting ads at consumers who are not influenced by ads won't have any greater effect. They're still just as likely to ignore them. The added overhead involved in accumulating this information is mostly wasted. Also, remember that the purpose of most advertising is not to inform a user of a product's existance, but to psycologically imprint that product's name so the next time the consumer is shopping and see's the product, they're more likely to grab it. This is why we still see coke commercials, even though everyone knows what coke is. It becomes an issue of name recognition.
Online, name recognition is less of a concern. If you're buying products online, you probably already know what you're looking for. The best an advertiser can hope for is to place a similar product next to one the consumer is looking for, hoping to catch his/her eye. Ultimately, every website will either have to fund their own content, which is fine until it becomes too popular to justify, charge subscriptions, which goes against the grain of what everyone is used to for content based websites, or sell products to generate revenue.
If more sites do this, then ads will have greater value. They will also advertise actual products instead of other content sites, which would create more cashflow. However, this could take some time.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Groovy
Doubleclick can punch my monkey!!!
Time to remove that 'doubleclick.com 127.0.0.1' from /etc/hosts now?
No, for two reasons:
Directing people to a usable resource is in no way flamebait. Bad moderator! No cookie!
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
everyone I know has bought a webcam thinking they would get hot cybersex pictures with it. While I don't know of anyone who bought directly from X10, I guarantee you they *all* were influenced primarily by the X10 popups.
...and is shifting from a media company to research and development for online ventures.
Perhaps they can research some of the brain damages and annoyances of the x10 popunder ads and give out a cookie that gets rid of them for more than 30 days.
--
Patrick Cable II
That's right, Doubleclick are still going to be serving up adverts. No, it is not time to remove the doubleclick entry from your hosts file.
You'll notice that on the linked page the following piece of code was included, loading an advert banner (that haven't blocked them already):
I wonder what they meant by unique profiles. I clean out my cookies every week or so. Does this mean I get to be unique hundreds of times? I'm sure the actual number of people they're tracking is much lower, especially when you prune people who appear not to have looked at a webpage in the last 6 months. It would require an enormous amount of work to get any value at all out of a database like that.
Crunch those numbers, boys!
--It's all fun and games, 'till someone loses an eye. Then it's one-eyed fun!--
Just think what a Peer-to-Peer Doubleclick Reimplementation could get away with - if they could include their evil warez into a popular home server application, like a game system or IM/ICQ client or music-piracy\\\\\\\distribution system or whatever, they might be able to cut the costs of distributing and summarizing their advertising information.
It's easy to make doubleclick appear to go away - on Unix systems, I alias it to "127.0.0.2", which is the machine next to mine, instead of 127.0.0.1, but that only works for things named doubleclick.com. If they start naming their domain names things like adserver.customer1.com and innocuous.customer2.com, it becomes much harder to block, and if they do a different software version that runs a CGI on the same server that their customer uses to serve images, then you wouldn't be able to block it without blocking the interesting site, unless you examine more detail than just the domain name.
Ad services are already going beyond the banner model, with many major sites putting up bigger ads in the middle of their content (e.g. ZDnet) as well as developing annoying popups, popunders, using garish blinking, etc. As costs come down, building effective tracking tools will become easier, while developing better ways to make you interested in the advertiser's content will continue to be a hard problem. That suggests that better-tracked ads should have a growing value relative to less-tracked ads, though both may still decline in absolute value, cost, and price.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The availability of free email accounts has mixed effects on advertising - you may know that disposable1234@free-lamer-mail.com also reads sports sites, but next month that mail system will have bit the dust and the same person will be disposable4567@dotgone.to, while simultaneously using gamez-freak-31337@yahoo.com to read the gamer egroups and no-canned-meat@yahoo.com to comment on political egroups. On the other hand, Hotmail pretty much invented the advertising-funded free email business model, so the Doubleclicks and Linkexchanges and similar businesses certainly have the incentive and ability to correlate between many of the user IDs, so they can sell that information to advertisers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, this sounds like basically the setup the last time that i checked, too -- which, admittedly, was about a year ago.
Your point about the licensing fees is well-taken, and of course there's all the service agreements, too.
I guess that I'm not having trouble believing that their data takes a huge setup and support, i'm having trouble believing that it's not worth it to a lot of people -- the value of this data is proportional to its evil, which was great indeed. for all the 'unique profile' laughter, when this worked, it was a data-collection technique with no competition, simply for its ubiquity of collection points.
god is just pretend.