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?""

Finally!

[JamesGreenhalgh]

Finally - no more waiting for web pages to load because they got hung up on attempts to contact doubleclick!

Good riddance

[totallygeek]

I hope they had the time of their life... -- Green Day

Ad banners have become an overlookable feature in most web pages. I would like to see further studies in targeted advertising. I mean, I hate the outdoors, pop music and fast food. Why show me ads for places to camp, discounts on CD-NOW, and contests with McDonalds?

Data Collected

[futuresheep]

What will happen to all the collected data? Will they sell it? Keep it? Destroy it?

temporary reprieve

[markj02]

"The lift you get from that kind of profiling just isn't enough to pay all that extra data storage and process costs,"

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.

Re:one step closer

[Tackhead]

> I don't care how innovative your flash banner, pop-under, or mouse trailer is, it's not going to make me more inclined to purchase your products.
>
> True, it may build brand recognition, and increase word-of-mouth talk about a particular company or item, but where's the proof in the pudding?

Hey, you were in the ad biz. You know as well as I do that an ad agent is a con man whose job it is to con his customers into thinking he can con his customers' customers.

As a marketroid once told a friend of mine, "If the customer leaves your site, having bought exactly what he wanted to buy, you haven't sold anything".

As I wish I'd been there to tell the marketroid - "Get the fsck out of my office." ;-)

Re:Nope, just use this hosts file

[jafac]

The problem with that is, the way Netscape 4.77 (Windows) seems to load pages, is, it won't fully render the page until these ad banners have timed out. This problem is particularly noticable on MyYahoo.

For this reason, I switched to IE and IE does not do this - I get to see the content sooner. Sucks, because, otherwise, I would continue to use Netscape.
However, Netscape (Macintosh) does not seem to have this problem.

Re:Hate advertising all you like...

[jhylkema]

I fully understand that companies need to advertise to promote their products. I have no problem with seeing banner ads for ThinkGeek.com on /., for example. In fact, I'll click on the ad to help out CmdrTaco and the guys from time to time. When my meager college student budget allows it, I'll even order something. Under normal circumstances, I can click past or tune out or fast forward or whatever. Most importantly, no record is kept and no dossier is formed on me.

Not true with DCLK. "Advertising" such as what DoubleClick is doing/has done is an entirely different matter. Not only did DoubleClick seek to track individual Web users' surfing habits, they sought to match it to their offline identity and sell that information to the highest bidder. Imagine if, thanks to DCLK, your life insurance company finds out you've been visiting www.jrcigars.com and then, mysteriously, your rates go up. Yet this is EXACTLY what they were trying to do.

As for this being a "temporary" move, DoubleClick isn't coming back. Their exiting the ad-tracking business is like Ford exiting the car business. Online advertising is dead and has been for quite some time, make no mistake about it. I, for one, am happy to see them go.

why compete with eBAY?

[LL]

Think people ... why do you have ads?

To sell something ...

What is the most efficient market for selling stuff ... ?
If you study the nobel prize winner of a few years ago, you'd discover that dutch auctions can be theoretically proven to be the most efficient price discovery process.

Guess who's implementing auctions in a massive way?
The same group that's expanding from collectibles to cars to sports gear to CDs ... (and I'm not talking Amazon here)

Already large-scale companies are dumping overstocked or out-dated goods on eBay ... there's no reason why they can't commoditise other mass market non-perishable bundles (think personal care kits, think entire kitchenware, think car personalisation). The biggest barrier to adoption has always been social ... the better micetrap doesn't work beyond a certain point. It's all about distribution, reliability, after-sales service, etc ...

OK that's the long-term killer for ads. Now what about service organisations (ie offering something other than tangible goods). The service is about finding someone to do something that you can't do yourself ... this is a directory problem. Already you see personal advertising in newspapers disappearing due to specialised employment agencies, help-desks, ... I see this trend also happening to banner-ads. People will go to specific trading sites which persists reputations rather than wanting to be inundated with services they don't need at the moment.

So ... the other ads that are left are the branding which are image/style based ... frankly those wish to be associated with an experience and reminding the user that you're responsible for a over-limit bandwidth bill and a waste of time is not good karma. Coke and Pepsi sponsor rock concerts not sport statistics.

In summary, unless there are some fundamental problems with my observations, I would say that ads as we know them (banner, etc) will become ineffective due to going under the personal threshold of normal perception. Go to a rural place and you'd really notice the *ABSENCE* of billboards. Instead you will be mor eproduct placements ... movie trailers which use products that normal people can identify with and feel part of the crowd. I can talk about social alienation in cities which lead people to identify with their professional peers rather than neighbours but this is a geek-site not socio-economic trend analysis.

In summary, IMHO pure ad-driven renue models will fail. It might have worked for the radio-broadcasting industry which requires continuous listening but unless something radical happens to social perception of the internet, the ability to jump-click outside a walled domain, and the fundamental cost-structure (ads=bandwidth=costs) I don't see them being viable.

Of course the 64 million dollar question is what is a viable business model which all the VCs would give their souls (or unmortgaged remainder thereof) to discover.

LL

Re:Idea

[magnetx11]

http://www.ewanted.com

used to do just that, have not checked it out lately though...

A clever ploy?

[Zarchon]

Ahh, but what if it's a trick specially *designed* to make us remove the ads.doubleclick entry from our personal blackhole lists? I can see it now. Four months from now, they'll announce their return to user-tracking, and will in fact have continued to track all us innocent users the whole time! :-)

*lol*

Zarchon

Try this Hosts file instead 11,000+ and counting

[sh0rtie]

here is a really comprehensive hosts file [remember.mine.nu] that blocks morpheus,bearshare,hotline and 11,000 advert servers, daily updates, instructions and works on all platforms including Linux/beos/macs/win ;)

No, keep blocking them

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to remove that 'doubleclick.com 127.0.0.1' from /etc/hosts now?

No, for two reasons:

1. They stopped because of profit, not ethical enlightenment. There's no reason to suspect that the people have suddenly become honest human beings.
2. It's too late, the earth there is scorched. The name is forever tainted. They can switch business models to giving away free puppies, but their name will still be cursed. If they want to have a name that resolves and a network whose packets are not dropped, they need a completely new identity. The trademark "doubleclick" shall always be a liability on their balance sheet. Let this be a lesson to others who contemplate the practice of evil.