A couple of days ago, the regulatory compliance firm Better Advertising announced that it had acquired the web-bug-tracking Firefox addon Ghostery. It got mentioned in a couple places but was under-discussed, given its potential importance.
Ghostery as a Firefox extension is important because it has an opt-in database of web bug usage, collected from its users. That plus users’ ability to selectively block web bugs creates interesting opportunities for community pressure – opportunities that more scorched-earth extensions like AdBlock lack. People that block all advertising are useless; people that selectively block advertising are worth monitoring closely. (I touched on this earlier here.)
Better Advertising as a company is important because it’s on the unpopular side of a popular bet – whether the government’s going to regulate online advertising or not. Most companies have been operating like they wouldn’t; it increasingly looks like it will. Should government regulation occur (I’ve called this ‘the adpocalypse‘ before, given the amount of technical effort that could be wiped out), Better Advertising’s in a great position to profit.
Together, Better Advertising+Ghostery can act as a direct conduit between the end users and the online advertising industry – connecting the acted upon and the actors. It’s a big open question which group will influence the other more, and who Better Advertising will favor – while they don’t have a business model yet, it’s likely that the advertising industry will pay their bills. But if they do it right, installing Ghostery and selectively making blocking decisions could have a direct impact on the practices of the ad industry as a whole. That’s something new.
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Greg, interesting post! You’re spot on re: the lack of coverage on the ghostery acquisition by mainstream tech blogs. Curious your thoughts on how these regulations will play out in the mobile space and who building BA+Ghostery for the mobile device?
Hey, Kelly. If the Boucher bill posted up in draft form today is any indication, mobile will initially be lumped under a set of ‘internet’ regulations that don’t fit it perfectly. Eventually more refined regulations will emerge, but this will take a while. In the meantime, mobile companies will try and comply with the existing regulations as best they can, to the extent they can, with a zeal correlated with the FTC’s zeal for enforcement.
A Better Advertising for mobile would be very difficult to implement due to the various restrictions imposed by each platform. You’d have to partner with the platform providers in certain cases just to get the access you’d need – good luck with that. However, I believe it’s doable for Android.