December 18, 2009
Behavioral Advertising Explained in Simple English
You're able to view this Fire Pit website of mine for free. It costs you nothing. The same is true for my AsktheBuilder.com website. How would you feel if those sites disappeared off the web, because I couldn't afford to pay the tens of thousands of dollars a year it costs me to provide these free services to you? Guess what, and this should not surprise you, there are politicians who are trying to make my websites and hundreds of thousands of other ones disappear. The leader of the gang is Congressman Rich Boucher, representing Virginia's 9th District.
You may not be tuned into the discussion of Behavioral Advertising, but I am. It's another legislative discussion happening that will have a profound impact on you if it passes as law. At the core of the issue is the collection of data that happens when you visit websites. Each time all of us surf the web, we leave a trail of cookie crumbs.
Here's the best way I can explain it, and I'm sure I'm leaving out some technical points. The servers that house my websites, as well as other website servers on the Internet, have the ability to collect the IP addresses of the personal and business computers that access the pages at my websites. Understand that each separate computer that accesses the Internet has a unique IP address. Think of an IP address as a social security number.
The IP address, among other things, tell me the general location of the computer, NOT the person who is actually at the keyboard. There is no hidden camera or fingerprint capture device. For example, I may know you're located in a certain city. I know the page you came from before you get to my site and I know the page you clicked to leave my site. But I have no idea of the who you really are. You could be Sasquatch for all I know.
This data can be used by advertising brokers to serve you ads that will solve the problems you have or show you ads about things you're interested in. It can predict your behavior. For example, if you visit hunting websites frequently, it assumes you like to hunt so you may see ads about boots, camo gear, and backpacks. I think you get the point.
I have ads like that on my website. They are provided by three different ad networks: Google, Chitika and Kontera. In fact, look on the right side of this page to see the Google ads. Well over 98 percent of my gross revenues come either directly or indirectly from these ads. If the ads were not there, I'd go out of business overnight. That's a fact. There is no way I could afford to pay all the costs to keep the websites up with no revenue coming in.
People like Congressman Boucher want websites like mine to have to serve you first with a screen that allows you to turn off these ads. You and I both know that 90 percent of the people will click to have the ads turned off. If that happens, then my revenue stream dries up instantly, and I turn off my websites. And you lose access to great free information. It's that simple.
Do you use Google as a search engine? Over 70 percent of the people who visit my websites do. Do you use Google Maps, Google Documents, Google Earth, Google's Picasa, Gmail, etc.? How do you think Google allows all that to be free to you and I? Yep, through ad revenue. What do you think will happen to Google? I could go on and on.
Read more about the issue at this website: KeepOurWebFree.org. If this upsets you, then you know what to do. Immediately contact your Congressman/woman and Senators and tell them to kill the Net Neutrality Bill.