The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [18]
To get a sense of Acxiom’s vision for the future, consider a travel search site like Travelocity or Kayak. Ever wondered how they make money? Kayak makes money in two ways. One is pretty simple, a holdover from the era of travel agents: When you buy a flight using a link from Kayak, airlines pay the site a small fee for the referral.
The other is much less obvious. When you search for the flight, Kayak places a cookie on your computer—a small file that’s basically like putting a sticky note on your forehead saying “Tell me about cheap bicoastal fares.” Kayak can then sell that piece of data to a company like Acxiom or its rival BlueKai, which auctions it off to the company with the highest bid—in this case, probably a major airline like United. Once it knows what kind of trip you’re interested in, United can show you ads for relevant flights—not just on Kayak’s site, but on literally almost any Web site you visit across the Internet. This whole process—from the collection of your data to the sale to United—takes under a second.
The champions of this practice call it “behavioral retargeting.” Retailers noticed that 98 percent of visitors to online shopping sites leave without buying anything. Retargeting means businesses no longer have to take “no” for an answer.
Say you check out a pair of running sneakers online but leave the site without springing for them. If the shoe site you were looking at uses retargeting, their ads—maybe displaying a picture of the exact sneaker you were just considering—will follow you around the Internet, showing up next to the scores from last night’s game or posts on your favorite blog. And if you finally break down and buy the sneakers? Well, the shoe site can sell that piece of information to BlueKai to auction it off to, say, an athletic apparel site. Pretty soon you’ll be seeing ads all over the Internet for sweat-wicking socks.
This kind of persistent, personalized advertising isn’t just confined to your computer. Sites like Loopt and Foursquare, which broadcast a user’s location from her mobile phone, provide advertisers with opportunities to reach consumers with targeted ads even when they’re out and about. Loopt is working on an ad system whereby stores can offer special discounts and promotions to repeat customers on their phones—right as they walk through the door. And if you sit down on a Southwest Airlines flight, the ads on your seat-back TV screen may be different from your neighbors’. Southwest, after all, knows your name and who you are. And by cross-indexing that personal information with a database like Acxiom’s, it can know a whole lot more about you. Why not show you your own ads—or, for that matter, a targeted show that makes you more likely to watch them?
TargusInfo, another of the new firms that processes this sort of information, brags that it “delivers more than 62 billion real-time attributes a year.” That’s 62 billion points of data about who customers are, what they’re doing, and what they want. Another ominously named enterprise, the Rubicon Project, claims that its database includes more than half a billion Internet users.
For now, retargeting is being used by advertisers, but there’s no reason to expect that publishers and content providers won’t get in on it. After all, if the Los Angeles Times knows that you’re a fan of Perez Hilton, it can front-page its interview with him in your edition, which means you’ll be more likely to stay on the site and click around.
What all of this means is that your behavior is now a commodity, a tiny piece of a market that provides a platform for the personalization of the whole Internet. We’re used to thinking of the Web as a series of one-to-one relationships: You manage your relationship with Yahoo separately from your relationship with your favorite blog. But behind the scenes, the Web is becoming increasingly integrated. Businesses are realizing