Are we paying attention to “Do Not Track”?
I just got off an Interactive Advertising Bureau webinar about Do Not Track legislation and what the advertising industry and something called the Progress & Freedom Foundation is doing to try to stop it. Afterward, I ran a quick Google search on “do not track legislation” and was appalled to find that not much has been written on the subject (or not much with good SEO). The first two pages of results were one good article from ReadWriteWeb and dozens of blog posts referring back to that article. Deeper into the results I did find a somewhat dated iMediaConnection article. I gave up several pages into the results.
Is the publishing industry paying attention here? For advertising to support the creation of good online content, we will need every means practical to make the advertising as relevant as possible to consumers. For that matter, as we at DailyMe are doing, we need to make the content as relevant as possible to users. To do this, we need to understand as much as we can discern about users by tracking how they came to our sites and what they do while there, as well as what they tell us about themselves.
Who wins when we can do this? The user. He will find more of his screen filled with content that is relevant and will spend less time sorting through irrelevant content and bypassing meaningless ads. But the user really wins because he’ll have free access to much better and richer content than will be possible if untargeted advertising is all we have to support the creation of content and development of useful web sites.
It was intriguing that this webinar was held on the same day that ClickZ reported on the latest Pubmatic AdPrice Index data showing that the price for advertising on Web sites dropped by about 53 percent in the fourth quarter vs. a year ago. CPMs in the $0.26 range will not support much in the way of great content.
Tags: do not target
