100 Billion Cookies and Nobody is Paying Attention
Despite all the hyperbole about the Internet advertising market M&A activities, I am surprised at the lack of critical perspective about the consolidation of cookies being placed and managed on users’ computers without their knowledge.
The recent spamacornucopia means more than $10 BILLION DOLLARS OF YOUR DATA IS BEING EXCHANGED AMONG BUYERS AND SELLERS THAT YOU DON’T CONTROL, starting with DoubleClick (and H&F their private equity owner) and Google, and then Right Media (Redpoint) and Yahoo!, and then 24/7 and WPP, and now aQuantive and Microsoft.
I have heard that a profile is worth a dollar.
One could assume that a clickstream is worth $10.
We know, after all, that a mortgage lead can be worth more than $100.
How much is a cookie worth? As in, how much does it cost a company now on average to place a cookie on a user’s desktop? Of course the folks at Tacoda, Blue Lithium and Revenue Science would know this with more granularity, but my sense is that a cookie is currently worth about $.10. Please comment below if you have additional perspective.
And so, the $10 billion dollars worth of online advertising deals would equate to about 100 billion cookies served.
Do we as users have any sense of this reality, or any control over its consequences?
May 21st, 2007 at 11:22 am
Au contraire! There are any number of startup people paying attention and working hard to build profiles that have value. Unlike you, some of us think the problem is self-correcting and profile abuse begets competitive disadvantage and vice versa. I’ll admit the perspective is a bit Utopian, but it seems to work in resolving most other Internet commons conflicts.
May 22nd, 2007 at 5:01 am
What’s winning now is the market, Scott. I think Seth’s vision is a bit more utopian than “other” people. You just sold the blogosphere’s attention to Yahoo for a quick buck, Scott. (I am not knocking that. I would too.) As long as companies can take advantage of the data without spelling it out to users, they will.
Media could be defined as “leveraging other people’s attention to make $”. So, “attention” is as much the property/product for media companies as distribution, content creation, or ad sales. It’s an integral part of the media system. It’s “utopian” to think that media will disregard that as their property and give it back to the “generator” of the attention. However, ultimately, I think they will have to. OR they wll atleast have to be transparent about it.
I bet we are a lot of “abuses” away before companies take the high road, though. Unfortunately.
May 31st, 2007 at 7:03 pm
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June 7th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Certainly there is and will be self-correction with respect to abuses, but in the meantime a lot of nasty stuff can and will happen– and most of it you won’t hear about. Profit-seeking businesses will (and must) rationally push the envelope in how they gather and use data, and because there are going to be significant network-effects (some to the consumer’s benefit, some not, some pretty creepy) and emergent properties coming out of this data collection and the provision of services based thereupon, it’s hard to know which are the actors who ultimately probably will be considered “bad” or “evil” and in fact it may be hard to point to anyone particularly. There are plenty of collect-data-now and use it later-not-sure-how plays out there, and this won’t change. I still think there’s room for someone to get the consumer more actively involved in understanding and leveraging his/her own information…
June 12th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
[…] at this issue: AttentionTrust. The brainchild of one of the brainiest people I’ve ever known, Seth Goldstein, who’s launched several companies with the intention of shaping and monetizing the “attention […]