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.
