p2pnet - rss feed: ‘Two Dead in Baghdad’ not ‘product friendly’
p2pnet news | P2P:- The New York Times is, “taking steps to boost online readership,” p2pnet posted yesterday.
That’s probably good —- just so long as it doesn’t look to the bad and the ugly for help.
But, “The problem for newspapers is that a story headlined ‘Two Dead in Baghdad’ isn’t very product-friendly,” reckons Kent Ertugrul, chief executive of Phorm, a “behavioral targeting company” working with British newspapers.
However, “if you know who is looking at the page, that’s where the opportunity is.”
Really? Yup. And it works like this:
You know who’s looking at what by tracking their progress online, keeping careful notes of who they are, where they live, how old they are, their social and economic status (if you can get your hands on those data), and where they’ve been, what they’ve done, who they’ve done it with, how long they stayed there, where they went next, and so on.
You then analyse these very private, very personal user data —- behaviours, if you want —- so you can tailor the results and then sell them to the advertising fraternities so they, in turn, can more reliably ‘target’ the owners of said information.
Phorm, singled out for unfavourable mention by the European Commission, brags it “partnered” with Phorm for the launch of OIX with FT.com, iVillage, Universal McCann, MGM OMD and Unanimis.
The Baghdad quote mentioned earlier comes in a Washington Post story which kicks off >>>
How do you find a bride these days?
One of the nation’s leading online tracking companies knows.
Monitoring consumers at roughly 3,000 Web sites, Revenue Science identified brides by picking out bridal behavior it had seen: anyone who’d gone online to read about weddings in the news, entered “bridesmaid dresses” into a search engine or surfed fashion pages for wedding styles.
The company found 40,000 such people, whom it knows by random number, not name, and sent them a tailored online ad.
And it’s, “just such added revenue, newspaper lobbyists argue, that the troubled newspaper industry may need to survive the online transition,” says Ertugrul in the story.
‘Transition’ means finding a way to deal with the reality that online, thanks to the Net, ‘consumers’ are customers again, people with the desire and ability to exercise free choice, which also means they now rely each other for news and information as much as they ever did on the mainstream media.
Which isn’t good for the mainstream print and electronic media.
But we digress and in the US, the Federal Trade Commission, is on the case, for whatever good that might do.
In its first draft of voluntary guidelines dealing with online tracking, it called for clear warnings of tracking and for allowing users to permanently opt out of a Web site’s tracking mechanism, continues the Washington Post.
“Every Web site,” according to the FTC’s draft rules, should allow consumers to “choose whether or not to have their information collected for such purpose,” it says.
They should be able to opt out, in other words.
But Paul Boyle of the Newspaper Association of America, which represents the business interests of most US dailies including The Washington Post, argues allowing the user to opt out isn’t necessary because, “If a user doesn’t want to be tracked by a site - assuming the user is aware of being tracked - he or she can simply avoid that site.”
Besides, Boyle noted, “users are free to periodically delete the cookies on their computers,” says the story.
Oh. That’s OK then.
“I really don’t know that there is a personal privacy issue here,” Boyle said. “The government really needs to let things play out.”
With Ertugrul and others of his ilk, such as MySpace, Facebook, et al, standing in the shadows.
Stay tuned.
(Cheers, Alex)
.
.Stumble It!
p2pnet - The programmable New York Times, May 27, 2008
Washington Post - FCC scrutinizes behaviorial targeting of Internet ads, May 26, 2008
unfavourable mention - EC targets Phorm, May 27, 2008
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May 29th, 2008 at 1:21 am
If I were searching for some product online would I want ads from someone spying on me? Of course, this is what Google does, but nope. Nor would I patronize them. What I want is to do my own searching of sites I choose. Not waste time with ad content loading up all over the place.
May 29th, 2008 at 2:49 am
> They should be able to opt out, in other words.
No. They should be able to opt *in*. Opt out isn’t the answer. See Spam.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:45 am
Current EU Law requires informed consent (opt-in).
Alexander Hanff