I've been in digital advertising for over 14 years, and have always been involved in tracking / targeting of ads. I don't bother to block cookies, simply because I honestly don't see much privacy infringement. At the back end of our tracking systems I just see a bunch of numbers. I've never once seen a name and honestly I have no desire to target or track an individual ... there's no money in such a tight target group, but we purposely don't try in any case.

All this Mozilla change means to me is that a lack of data will mean I pay web publishers less ... and I deliver nappy ads to pensioners :P

What worries this little advertising stalwart is credit checking firms, they're much more likely to have the data you're looking to protect and none of it comes from third party cookies.

Peace out ...

This article is pretty misleading. Overall spend on paid search is up, not down. Spend on online display is up, not down.

One of the liked articles says "To make up for the CPC loss, it managed to increase overall clicks by 42 percent". That's pretty speculative as to the direction of causation. It makes more sense that clicks are growing heavily in non-premium keywords, ones that command lower price points. I haven't seen any evidence that premium keyword ad pricing is falling dramatically.

One thing that does ring true is that overall online advertising spend growth is trailing inventory growth, and therefore per-unit pricing on inventory is probably decreasing. Spend growing, inventory volumes growing faster, per unit prices falling.

I just donated $10. I have two thoughts that might help:
1. Put a prominent donate button on the homepage. It took me a while to find how to donate, and this will reduce donations greatly.
2. Offer a donation subscription. I'd happily offer $2 per month for instance, which would be a lot more than $10 over time.

Yeah, this is a bit of an issue for me. DNT is a value in the header, nothing more. However it pans out, 'good' companies will end up respecting it, and everyone else - probably the nasties - won't care. P3P, if you remember it, required anyone setting cookies to declare their privacy policy in the header. I'm really not sure why that's been thrown out but, whilst being more granular in privacy statements, it also allowed anyone to simply lie and the browser wouldn't know the difference. Not all cookies are evil, so the question is how to reliably identify those set by respectable businesses that follow the prevailing guidelines and are interested in being 'good'.

This is a potential disaster in my eyes. We're talking about destroying the commercial web here. Advertising, for all its foibles, underpins vast amounts of free content and services. Data largely drives that value these days, by making ad distribution more efficient. The vast majority of the data underpinning this is anonymous - no names, no email addresses, no phone numbers - just general preferences inferred from the types of sites people visit. DNT is not defined yet, but I suggest that a lot of your favourite websites are supported or helped by this data. Even slashdot has advertising these days. Slashdotters have a choice by nature of knowing how things work, but there's also some pretty decent advertising industry programs aimed at giving information and choice to consumers. Blanket DNT could seriously destroy businesses at-scale. I'm really worried about this move.