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The evolution of online advertising technology – More than orientation, fewer of Privacy (Part One)

In the beginning of targeted online advertising, there were banner ads. As many people recall, these should lead to the online marketing industry in its infancy. Lots of publishers pay lots of money based on the CPI (Cost per impression) model or simply paid huge dollars for banner ads and online advertising to other sites rather victims of trafficking

Then something crazy happened – nothing. It turns out that the technology of banner advertising on the Internet was not the magic solution is intended to be. The old way of making money based on providing content (the way magazines and newspapers ran advertising) just did not seem to work in this context.

This advertising technology was part of the reason for the collapse of the dot-bomb era. All the talk was on "Eyes," "stiff," "bleeding edge," "Cradle to grave ", and several other terms that, in retrospect, would have sounded more at home in a Wes Craven movie than in an emerging industry. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of business models dependent on traditional marketing strategy working more or less the same as always had when introduced into a non-traditional setting.

At the same time, a company, originally called GoTo, then Overture, and finally bought by Yahoo!, Actually made an advertising system directed line that worked – keyword advertising. Companies could bid on a per click basis of some key terms, which sent valuable traffic to your site web.

Obviously, the improvement in advertising technology had to do with the model itself, which was perpetuated on relevance. By bidding just words key you want, you could only pay for visitors who had already shown an interest in their products or services. This model of targeted online advertising was soon copied by Google, that the very tight and did better.

There were not many raised eyebrows at the moment, in terms of privacy. After all, the user was the one entering the query, and nobody suspected at the time that search engines might one day actually create individual profiles of users. We were all just very happy "to have information at our disposal" without the potential hazards of ink stains and paper cuts that traditional research required.

Then Google had a similar idea a step further. Instead of simply serving targeted advertising online at its homepage, the company created a content distribution network called AdSense. In this program, website owners can register for the ads placed on their sites. Then Google will use a "contextual" logic to determine which ads to place. In other words, Google "reads" the contents of a page then serve targeted online advertising in the area provided by the owner of the site that was relevant to the content.

There were a few missteps with this advertising technology (one classic example was when the online version of the NY Post published an article in 2004 on a murder victim whose body parts had been packed in a suitcase. Along with the story was an announcement that Google is for Samsonite luggage.) However, this targeted online advertising service also had success, with nary a cry from privacy people. After all, you do not have to visit the sites. And the site owners do not have to register for the service, right?

Suddenly, Gmail was offered and that raised some eyebrows. Gmail, of course, is based on Google's free e-mail platform. Gmail gave people one (at that time) unprecedented 1 gigabyte of email space (Yahoo!, If memory serves, offered 4 megs for free email accounts and charged people for more memory). The only caveat – Gmail would use a AdSense advertising platform similar technology, but would decide which ads to serve by reading through your email.

Well, this new approach to advertising technology creeped some people, and privacy advocates were a bit more vocal about analyzing online targeted advertising via e-mail messages of people. A California lawmaker tried to introduce some legislation preventing the practice. Privacy International groups intervened with his own concerns. In the end, however, the fact is he had to register to get a Gmail account and all I did was (presumably) aware of how the service worked before they enrolled. So it was an opt-in system – If you Google does not want to scan through your email and serving relevant ads on specific line, which did not have to use the service.

So there we were all happily surfing away, not a care in the world. What most of us did not realize it was free enough cookies are being distributed to each of us to turn the other docile Keebler elves into tree-dwelling Mafioso erroneously drawing a turf war.

These "cookies" of course, are the web sites on your computer when you visit – little packets that the information in your record of visits and, sometimes, your activity. There is certainly a legitimate reason for it. When you return to a website, can help if you remember your last visit and you can continue where you left off. Suppose, for example, they were making multiple purchases in e-commerce site and there was a lot of things in your shopping cart but were forced to flee before termination. It's nice to come back and continue where you left off without having to do it all again.

Digital advertising, however, saw another advertising opportunity directed online. They invented advertising technology that travel through the cookies on your personal computer, find out what he liked and likes to look at the types of sites visited, and then feed up highly specific online advertising based on browsing history. These companies included aQuantive, DoubleClick, ValueClick, and others. Of the companies I've mentioned, only ValueClick is still independent. Google did with DoubleClick, while Microsoft did with aQuantive. It is clear that these companies believe in the future of Internet advertising technology and also believe in the long term legality of this technology.

Now some real red flags were raised. I have written about this advertising technology before, so I will not go over it again here. Suffice it to say that some government regulators were very skeptical about this new form of advertising technology and there have been numerous suggestions for regulation. The lack of public uproar, however, has not really created any reaction against the companies concerned. It may be that there is widespread ignorance about Internet advertising technology (and I think there are, on based on conversations with people of average Internet experience). Maybe part of it is also that privacy has been eroding on the Internet one step at a time.

To be continued in the second part … Read more web design article

About the Author

Head SEO, Marketing at AIT India