A quickie before I head off to my last day of training before test-time:
So, most people reading this site are probably familiar with BugMeNot, which I won’t link to here for the obvious reason, but you ought to be able to find on your own. Anyway, they’re planning a petition drive for the fall, to try to draw attention to what they see as fundamental bugs in the registration process of various news sites.
“Advertisers are sold demographic data or products based on this data,” said an anonymous BugMeNot organizer in an e-mail interview. “The idea is to highlight the flawed nature of what they are buying and get these sites to move on to a more sustainable and responsible business model.”
The petition’s signers, which numbered 525 at press time, pledge to register an account using false information at one or more of ten prominent Web sites on November 13. The sites include the online presences of the New York Times, the New York Post, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the San Jose Mercury News.
As the article mentions, 525 signers of an online petition isn’t exactly a huge audience, but it’s my opinion that news sites and other similar organizations will keep a wary eye on their progress. While I’m certainly not going to slam WPNI for trying to do its best to target its ads as narrowly as possible (remember, those ads help to pay my salary, after all), I do think that there’s a danger in relying too heavily on such data. The question is, is this the fault of the website, or of the advertisers demanding this type of information?
Advertisers and publishers must strike a delicate balance as consumers gain more control over media, said Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Intelliseek, which measures consumer sentiment online.
“There’s plenty of data and research to suggest there’s heightened sensitivity to advertising. That’s only going to continue as advertising continues to push the post-TV ad model, which is largely unknown,” he said. “In this case, there’s heightened sensitivity about how much information consumers need to volunteer to allow you to be an effective advertiser. There’s just going to be a constant tension that everyone needs to manage.”
Long-time Post readers may recall that the registration system used to consist of three elements: sex, year of birth, and zip code. However, the push for ad dollars requires a much sharper focus, and tools like the two-homepage project would be very difficult without this kind of detail. The goal for us will be to convince readers that spending a few minutes creating a personal account will pay off in more sensible ads, and a better reader experience overall. Otherwise, it devolves into yet another technological arms race, with registration system developers on one end and groups like BugMeNot on the other. And anybody who knows anything about technology knows who’s going to win that one.
(again, found via PaidContent.org)
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