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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?""
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."
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
You're right, of course -- and given that this is the case, doesn't this seem like a strange move, to get completely out of tracking? Their dart tags had termendous potential for tracking people, given the ubiquity of DC-served ads. What does it really cost them to keep tracking this stuff, besides a few more boxes in back -- which they already own, btw?
Sure, there are other overhead issues here when it comes to analysis or putting a front-end on the collected data, but the one and only time i used dc data in my modeling, i made them give it to me raw, which they did with a little arm-twisting.
Just seems a little baby-bathwateresque, with the hardware and the software already in place to chuck the whole thing. Are they really doing this? And does anyone know why?
PS -- i know they're evil. that makes this seem *more* strange, not less.
god is just pretend.