Slashdot Mirror
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?""
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
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!
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- - 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/
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.
http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html
> Okay, I'm over it now - when's the fire sale auction?
Yeah. I wanna buy a server from Doubelick, just so I can open it up, remove one platter from one drive for a headstone, and bury the rest of the server six feet underground.
Then I'll grab my trusty Dremel and engrave the following:
"Posterity will ne'er survey,
A nobler grave than this;
Here lie the bones of a Doubleclick server,
Stop, traveler, and piss."
(With apologies to Lord Byron)
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
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.
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!!!