February 13, 2003

NYTimes’ ‘wide angle targeting’ good and bad

An arti­cle on CNet today focuses on, what I think, is the next log­i­cal step in online advertising.

They report that the New York Times is plan­ning to imple­ment a pro­gram that would track what con­tent users access and deliver ads to them, through­out the entire site, that matches their read­ing habits.

With Wide Angle Tar­get­ing, NYTimes.com is putting people into con­tex­tual cat­e­gories by mon­i­tor­ing how many times they visit cer­tain sec­tions of the site, includ­ing health and sports. If a vis­i­tor reads five or more health-​related sto­ries per month, for exam­ple, then he or she would be a prime target for a diet ad while vis­it­ing the enter­tain­ment front page.

I think this is a great idea. The promise, and part of what dif­fer­en­ti­ates the Inter­net as a medium from print or online, is the abil­ity to get to know your audi­ence better by instant track­ing of usage.

News­pa­pers have to rely on post-​hoc read­er­ship sur­veys to deter­mine what their read­ers like, but I’ve always held, and past research has shown, that read­ers lie.

Read­ers know they’re being stud­ied and will often tell researchers what they think they want to hear.

With the Inter­net, and for the New York Times this doesn’t have to, and isn’t, the case.

There have been pri­vacy con­cerns about this sort of track­ing before. I’ve always con­tended that as long as this track­ing infor­ma­tion isn’t sold or given to other mar­keters in indi­vid­ual terms like “Joe often reads book reviews, espe­cially if the head­line has the word ‘sex’ in it,” then there’s no harm

How­ever, the Times doesn’t seem to agree with me.

For now, the com­pany is only deliv­er­ing aggre­gate infor­ma­tion to adver­tis­ers, being sure not to reveal per­sonal data. But in the future, it is look­ing at being able to give the mar­keter more per­sonal or demo­graphic information.

This is the sort of pri­vacy vio­la­tion that makes users wary of giving any infor­ma­tion to sites. That means less tar­geted, and less prof­itable ads, which could lead to more paid access.

That’s bad for users, adver­tis­ers and publications.

There’s noth­ing wrong with the Times offer­ing extremely tar­geted ads.

Everything’s wrong with giving out data on user’s surf­ing habits.

I can only hope they wisen up.

Filed under: Business

Next:
Previous:

Related

Comments