Tag: publishing

Good news for publishers and advertisers fearing the GDPR

September 3, 2017 / / 5 Comments

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the world’s most heavily weaponized law protecting personal privacy. It is aimed at companies that track people without asking, and its ordnance includes fines of up to 4% of worldwide revenues over the prior year.

The law’s purpose is to blow away the (mostly US-based) surveillance economy, especially tracking-based “adtech,” which supports most commercial publishing online.

The deadline for compliance is 25 May 2018, just a couple hundred days from now.

There is no shortage of compliance advice online, much of it coming from the same suppliers that talked companies into harvesting lots of the “big data” that security guru Bruce Schneier calls a toxic asset. (Go to https://www.google.com/search?q=GDPR and see whose ads come up.)

There is, however, an easy and 100% GDPR-compliant way for publishers to continue running ads and for companies to continue advertising. All the publisher needs to do is agree with this request from readers:

That request, along with its legal and machine-readable expressions, will live here:

The agreements themselves can be recorded anywhere.

There is not an easier way for publishers and advertisers to avoid getting fined by the EU for violating the GDPR. Agreeing to exactly what readers request puts both in full compliance.

Some added PR for advertisers is running what I suggest they call #Safeds. If markets are conversations (as marketers have been yakking about since  The Cluetrain Manifesto), #SafeAds will be a great GDPR conversation for everyone to have:

Here are some #SafeAds benefits that will make great talking points, especially for publishers and advertisers:

  1. Unlike adtech, which tracks eyeballs off a publisher’s site and then shoot ads at those eyeballs anywhere they can be found (including the Web’s cheapest and shittiest sites), #SafeAds actually sponsor the publisher. They say “we value this publication and the readers it brings to us.”
  2. Unlike adtech, #SafeAds carry no operational overhead for the publisher and no cognitive overhead for readers—because there are no worries for either party about where an ad comes from or what it’s doing behind the scenes. There’s nothing tricky about it.
  3. Unlike adtech, #SafeAds carry no fraud or malware, because they can’t. They go straight from the publisher or its agency to the publication, avoiding the corrupt four-dimensional shell game adtech has become.
  4. #SafeAds carry full-power creative and economic signals, which adtech can’t do at all, for the reasons just listed. It’s no coincidence that nearly every major brand you can name was made by #SafeAds, while adtech has not produced a single one. In fact adtech has an ugly history of hurting brands by annoying people with advertising that is unwelcome, icky, or both.
  5. Perhaps best of all for publishers, advertisers will pay more for #SafeAds, because those ads are worth more.

#NoStalking and #SafeAds can also benefit social media platforms now in a world of wonder and hurt (example: this Zuckerberg hostage video). The easiest thing for them to do is go freemium, with little or no ads (and only safe ones on the paid side, and nothing but #SafeAds on the free side, in obedience to #NoStalking requests, whether expressed or not.

If you’re a publisher, an advertiser, a developer, an exile from the adtech world, or anybody else who wants to help out, talk to us. That deadline is a hard one, and it’s coming fast.

How customers can debug business with one line of code

April 19, 2016 / / 1 Comment

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Four years ago, I posted An olive branch to advertising here. It began,

Online advertising has a couple of big problems that could possibly be turned into opportunities. One is Do Not Track, or DNT. The other is blocking of ads and/or tracking.

Publishers and the advertising business either attacked or ignored Do Not Track, which was too bad, because the ideas we had for making it work might have prevented the problem those businesses now have with ad blocking.

According to the latest PageFair/Adobe study,  the number of people blocking ads passed 200 million last May, with double-digit increases in adoption, worldwide. Tracking protection is also gaining in popularity.

While those solutions provide individuals with agency and scale, they don’t work for publishers. Not yet, anyway.

What we need is a solution that scales for readers and is friendly to publishers and the kind of advertising readers can welcome—or at least tolerate, in appreciation of how ads sponsor the content they want. This is what we have always had with newspapers, magazines, radio and TV in the offline world, none of which ever tracked anybody anywhere.

So now we offer a solution. It’s a simple preference, which readers can express in code, that says this: Just show me ads that aren’t based on tracking me. Equally simple code can sit on the publishers’ side. Digital handshakes can also happen between the two.

This term will live at Customer Commons, which was designed for that purpose, on the model of Creative Commons (which also came out of work done by folks here at the Berkman Center).  This blog post provides some context.

We’ll be working on that term, its wording , and the code that expresses and agrees to it, next week at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Monday will be VRM Day. Tuesday through Thursday will be IIW—the Internet Identity Workshop (where ProjectVRM was incubated almost ten years ago). VRM Day is mostly for planning the work we’ll do at IIW. VRM Day is free, and IIW is cheap for three days of actually getting stuff done. (It’s by far the most leveraged conference I know, partly because it’s an unconference: no keynotes, panels or sponsor booths. Just breakouts that participants create, choose and lead.)

If you care about aligning publishing and advertising online with what worked for hundreds of years offline — and driving uninvited surveillance out of business itself — come help us out.

This one term is a first step. There will be many more before we customers get the full respect we deserve from ad-funded businesses online. Each step needs to prove to one business category or another that customers aren’t just followers. Sometimes they need to take the lead.

This is one of those times.  So let’s make it happen.

See you next week.

 

 

EmanciPay: a new business model for newspapers

February 5, 2009 / / 7 Comments

Rex Hammock is right to gripe about the newspaper turtles pulling their heads in their shells and complaining that readers aren’t paying for the goods papers offer for free online. In that post he runs down some of the drumbeats he’s been hearing:

Here’s the problem with all of those systems: they’ll all be different, silo’d, inconsistent with each other. And doomed to fail for all those reasons.

Here’s the solution: One new system that makes it as easy as possible for readers to pay for the goods, but voluntarily, on their own terms. This new system would turn consumers into customers by giving them the pricing gun. And here’s what’s also cool about it: We’re already working on it at ProjectVRM. It’s called EmanciPay. (Note: when this was written, it was still called “PayChoice”. DS – 1 September 2009)

It’s still early. But it will get a lot less early if some of these pubs stop complaining and put their shoulders (and their wallets) behind work that’s already going on.

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