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In all the comments here, I can't find anybody who thinks that Yahoo is doing the right thing here. Well, I do. I think what Yahoo is doing is the right thing for them, for their users, and for the web. If the web is going to be ad supported, then its going to have to be targeted advertising or its going to be both shit and annoying. Remember "punch the monkey", or ads that took over the entire screen? Now, through tracking, we are able to get really really good ads - things you might even be interested to see and buy. If DNT was supported by everybody and on by default, that's the end of online advertising in its current form. So we can choose from the following options: ignore DNT, ignore DNT for IE10, or go back to non-targeted advertising. Let's assume the last of those, which leads us to the following options: revert to shit ads, make users pay for content directly, or pack up your content-producing company and go home. None of these are best for the users or the web. The DNT founders know this - that's why it was default null in the spec and in Firefox. IE10 is doing this deliberately even though they know it can't work, and there are choices here: they are trying to improve the world but are incredibly wonderfully naive, they want to undermine Google, or they want to undermine DNT. I'd love to believe its the first, but no-one has ever claimed that about MS. |
I also think your slippery-slope argument is excess drama. The notion that untracked users force us to a world of shitty ads is implausible to me. When I saw punch-the-monkey ads disappear, it was because publishers realized that terrible ads destroyed the value of their brand.
I agree that money has shifted toward more tightly tracked ads. But if large portions of the readership are untracked, there's no reason to think that the money won't shift back. Vendors won't stop advertising, and they won't go back to print.
And really, it's not clear that the current model is sustainable anyhow. CPMs have been falling for years. I was just talking with a founder of a (now-sold) ad-supported content company. He said that there's no way he'd do that again; rates are low and are headed lower. And there's much more competition for eyeballs from SEO-optimized, attention-getting bullshit.