Commentary

Gator, Gator Everywhere!

The Gator debate is back in the industry news again and has inspired the hottest and heaviest rhetoric in the biz since CBS Marketwatch declared they were no longer going to report on click-through rates.

Tom Hespos wrote a great piece last week in the Online Spin regarding Gator, laying out exactly what he sees as the real issue is with Gator as a device used for distributing advertising messages and the publishers that are currently filing suit against them. For those of you frequenting the Spin Board, you saw the spectrum of passions that have been stirred.

Well, far be it from me to pass this over in silence.

But this isn’t the first time that the online media Senate has gotten their togas in a bunch over Gator. Last summer, the IAB was to file suit against Gator for their particular brand of ad delivery. Folks like Tig Tillinghast and myself weighed in then, and almost as soon as the shouting started, by the fall, the two parties entered a minor Pax Digitas and it seemed like all would be right with the world.

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But now, with this new lawsuit, old mistrusts and hurts have resurfaced.

So, there are certainly major questions that need to be asked and answered about the Gator issue, not the least of which is, who owns the impression and who owns the desktop?

Tom addressed much of this last week, and I talked about impression ownership back in January. When you get right down to it, the site owns the impressions connected directly to their own content and which has incurred some cost for the site. But the user is sole owner of his or her desktop.

So what is a site in Gator-infested waters to do?

The only thing that lies within their purview of the rights of a site seems to me the development of some kind of technology or “poison pill,” if you will, that disables Gator while a user is visiting that particular site. Blocking users with some form of all-or-nothing filter approach does not make good sense. Better to softly rap the knuckles of one committing a trespass against you than to repeatedly chop off their arm.

But the legal dismantling of a business and/or application that happens to do something better than the sites are doing it is not a solution. I've said for a long time that better mousetraps can lead to smarter mice. No reason sites can't become smarter and create some kind of device that deactivates the Gator application when a user comes to that site.

Sure, this could lead to an ad technology arms race, but so what? War is hell and so is business. Don't see why the courts or government should be asked to help lazy businesses get around being smarter. Though it is so that other media don't have to contend with this kind of thing, as other media don't lend themselves to it, this is the price that is paid for playing with a new media. In a brave new world, you've got to be brave...

Some of this industry’s greatest minds have made the analogy of Gator as cable de-scrambler. This is not an appropriate analogy. A cable de-scrambler is an additional piece of hardware that is allowing me the benefit of content for which I have given nothing in exchange.

Gator is not making this possible. The ads are still running on NYTimes.com, they just have to compete with an ad that does NOT belong to NYTimes.com but that the user visiting NYTImes.com has invited to be part of his or her experience.

I think a more interesting issue regarding Gator is, when buying it as an ad vehicle, why does it cost so much compared to media purchased from a publisher direct? There are no expenses to create content or anything. It's just a little application that "remembers" user-provided information for the purposes of easy form population. Hell, the newest versions of web browsers do that. Quite frankly, as a media buyer, I'd rather buy NYTimes.com inventory from NYTimes.com, as it could cost less and there is more control over its delivery.

What Gator is really doing is coat tailing. Now, what the implications are for that remain to be seen. As I wrote in January, “I do think that [Gator’s] existence and success, and applications like it, benefit more from existing in a box with Schrodinger's cat; a kind of quantum uncertainty, rather than on fundamental principles of proper business practices, moral capitalism, or any other form of theoretic solidity.” This has not changed, yet.

I may not agree with Gator, but, to paraphrase Voltaire, I’ll fight to the death for its right to exist.

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