Some ad industry executives
have said that ad targeting holds the potential to solve newspapers'
well-publicized revenue woes by allowing papers to monetize op-eds, crime stories or other pieces that don't lend themselves to contextual ads.
If so, one question is whether proposals for an
easy-to-implement do-not-track mechanism would hurt newspapers' online ad prospects. The answer, surprisingly, might be no, at least for major newspapers and portals, according to newspaper industry
expert Ken Doctor.
Writing at the Nieman Journalism Lab, Doctor says that newspapers might be able to
continue targeting readers even without tracking them across other companies' Web sites.
Doctor doesn't delve into the history of behavioral targeting, but it's worth remembering that the
companies that pioneered the technology -- Tacoda and Audience Science -- started by deploying it for newspapers on a publisher-by-publisher basis. In fact, it wasn't clear that publishers would ever
want to join networks that gathered data about readers when such data would allow those readers to be targeted while visiting competitors' sites.
In his column, Doctor suggests that
newspapers can seize an opportunity to "transparently offer reader/consumers the opportunity to 'opt in' to a wider world of reading and shopping targeting. Then, they could re-emerge, in the tablet
era no less, as community and national centers of news -- and commerce."
He's not the only one to suggest a similar model. Three years ago, Internet futurist Esther Dyson proposed "Disclosure 2.0" -- a system where consumers could state exactly what kinds of ads they wished to
receive from marketers.
Whether publishers will want to implement these models remains unknown. But given the scrutiny that the online media industry is facing, and their own revenue
problems, experimenting with opt-in targeting doesn't seem like the worst idea for news sites to try.