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DoubleClick On The Blocks?
A reader writes: "Many sources report that DoubleClick - the world's leading supplier of cookies - may be up for sale. " There's also an AP report out as well. The online advertising market has been hard lately - but there's also been a widespread perception that DoubleClick has been resting on their laurels.
Maybe we should take up a spreadfirefox.com-like donation and buy Doubleclick and then distroy all the data they have collected over the years.
Actually at work we solved it company wide. we block doubleclick and other sites like it at the proxy.
we save HUGE amounts of bandwidth by using AD blocking rules in the proxy. to the point that most offices asked why we upgraded their bandwidth only a day or two after setting up the rulesets.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Google is a much bigger company, with a bigger pull for those that want to advertise. They also probably target their ads better than doubleclick. Oh and Google's motto is "do no evil" not "all your personal information are belong to us."
It's easy to see why Google would have a superior position in the market now. Better technology, bigger reach and a more honorable policy toward Internet users.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Can't wait for Microsoft to buy out DoubleClick and TAKE OVER THE WORLD!
Actually that makes a bit sense. Not the taking over the world part, but the Microsoft buying Doubleclick part. Microsoft seems interested in things like Search Engines, so why not advertising? Microsoft is trying to get into the "content serving" industry, so this seems like a sensible thing to do...
Unless you all want to go to paid subscription sites how do you think these sites make any money?
Someone has to pay for bandwidth, servers, etc...
It's just like TV - we either have to suffer through commercials - or we have paid services like HBO. Personally - I'll take the commercials.
"resting on their laurels" boy, I'd say. To see their stats on ads delivered vs Google's adsense... google delivers more banners than doubleclick by almost double. I think DoubleClick is fucked up & they can't be bothered to fix it.
Make that three- they (and many other advertisers and other sites) needlessly set cookie expiration dates to 2040 and whatnot; I wouldn't mind it so much if they didn't collect like a plague; every few weeks I go through my cookie list and there are literally thousands of cookies from a hundred different advertisers all set to expire in a zillion years. It's absurd, and clearly they don't get it- these cookies should have an expiration of maybe one year at the absolute most. A month or so should be fine in most cases.
I think someone should write a plugin for the various free browsers that punishes bad cookie lifetime params- maybe it inversely sets the actual expiration date in an inverse fashion if the requested date is too far off. For example, over a year, start actually going back down for each year they add. So a cookie marked good until 2040 will actually be good for about a few hours- or less.
Users will bitch, site developers will be forced to look at why it's happening, and the answer from the internet community will be "set more reasonable cookie expiration dates and it won't happen". They'll be in the uncomfortable position of trying to explain why they need such long dates.
Either that or simply allow the user to set a maximum cookie retention time. What I'd REALLY like is a browser that doesn't save cookies for sites I haven't bookmarked, or combine the ideas- cookies for sites not bookmarked aren't saved very long.
Please help metamoderate.
Brilliant. Much like evolutionary theory, business exists to fill a need. Whether you like it or not, SOMEONE wants the business that DoubleClick offeres. Kill it off, and you have created a vaccuum that will be filled by another company. And we will be a little bit poorer!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
i wonder if this being hit hard thing has anything to do with windows sp2 having ie block popups by default :|
-judging another only defines yourself
Firefox lets you selectively block certain sites from setting cookies. I don't let Doubleclick set ANY cookies EVER on my computers. In fact, the only sites that DO get to are the ones where I shop at, or I use logins. Every time a site tries to set one I get a popup allowing me to deny it. On a new install there'll be a lot of these but as the block list gets populated with the major advertisers it calms down and now I don't see them very often. And I'd rather see the occasional notification than let these guys spy on me.
"However, banner advertising is like TV advertising. Its "presence"."
X10 went out of business. That's how effective "presence" was. Who the hell cares, if "everyone" knows about it. Clearly it didn't work.
Google, on the other hand, generated about $800M in revenue in the last quarter. From what I've read that's almost entirely advertising revenue. DoubleClick, on the other hand, made $81M in their last quarter.
Looks like "presence" doesn't really pay.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I have some personal experience with this, as I wrote part of the ad targeting system.
The problem was that there was no easy and quick way to search the data. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes. The data collected was compacted into specialized binary files, but there was no way to (quickly) find what you wanted...if you searched for zip code and audience gender, you'd have to sequentially go through the files and pull out the number of hits. I did it once...it took 3 days.
So instead they were aggregated into much smaller files. The problem with these files, though, is that they were statistically imperfect, and that they took a long time to generate. Generating them was not trivial either, and I know it missed things (though this was explained away as being statistically irrelevant).
There were some attempts to use statistical models to speed up the process...basically anything to avoid having to troll through the data. Even data warehousing was problematic because that is built around predefined queries and you were doing dynamic stuff (zip and gender today, browser type tomorrow). There were too many variables to allow for any kind of canned query.
So while I do sympathize, understand that half a dozen phds couldn't come up with anything better. I think it was as good as it could have been, for that time.
voip01:~# ping -c 4 0.0.0.0
PING 0.0.0.0 (127.0.0.1) from 127.0.0.1 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.052 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.014 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.013 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.013 ms
--- 0.0.0.0 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% loss, time 2997ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.013/0.023/0.052/0.016 ms
voip01:~# uname -a
Linux voip01 2.4.26-1-686-smp #1 SMP Sun May 2 19:39:21 CEST 2004 i686 unknown
voip01:~#