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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?""
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
>
> 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?
Hey, you were in the ad biz. You know as well as I do that an ad agent is a con man whose job it is to con his customers into thinking he can con his customers' customers.
As a marketroid once told a friend of mine, "If the customer leaves your site, having bought exactly what he wanted to buy, you haven't sold anything".
As I wish I'd been there to tell the marketroid - "Get the fsck out of my office." ;-)
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."
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.
" 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") "
Advertising doesn't offend me. What does offend me, however, are ads that manipulate, or take over my browser (pop ups, pop under/overs, interstitials, scrollers). Most offensive of all are tracker ads that track my movements OFF the site that has the ad.
And it offended enough people for whole browsers (Mozilla, Konqueror) to be written with features specifically designed to halt this, if the user so chose.
As I said, I don't mind ads as a way to pay for content on a site, any more than I mind ads on TV and radio. But TV and radio advertisers learn NOTHING personally about me just for my action of watching/listening to any given show. They get my info only if I choose to give it, by responding to their ad.
Really, the whole internet advertising business killed itself by doing this. By collecting such information and making it available to their advertisers, it created the illusion that internet ads are LESS effective than any other form.
What I think is that this let the cat of truth out of the marketer's bag, that really ALL forms of advertising are routinuely ignored by a public that is increasingly bombarded and increasingly resistant. It's just that on TV and radio, the advertiser has no DIRECT, perfect statistics to back this up as they do with internet ads.
I believe once internet ads return to the same philospohy of TV, print, and radio ads, to make impressions and build recognition, rather than as a "buy me NOW!" button, they will be much more effective.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
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
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
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
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.
For the uninitiated (and for those who aren't forced to use Win at work), eDexter acts as a local-only HTTP server (not accessible through the Net)which replaces the empty boxes caused by 127.0.0.1 in Hosts and stops the resulting time-outs. eDexter has its own image for the space that an ad uses. The default image is a 43-byte GIF (thin pink bar).
Better yet, it doesn't interfere with a locally-running "server" <gag, cough, choke> like IIS or MS Personal Web Server, which some of us also have to run at work. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
woof.
Of COURSE I'd rather run SuSE (even if it would get me sued), but my company wouldn't exist without closed source. And our security is almost as good as Microsoft's! Like Krusty said, don't blame me; they shove all of this money in my hand!
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
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
Doubleclick can punch my monkey!!!