How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web

My startup is in digital advertising (includes desktop, phones and tablets) space. And I know digital advertising is hated by users. There are three main reasons, online ads are obnoxious, obtrusive and invade end-user privacy. Lets step back and understand how come advertising was considered as glamorous and it turned into evil with digital medium.

Advertising for years operated on the "purchase funnel" concept [1][2]. Top end of the funnel is occupied by big brand advertisers whose goal is to create awareness for the brands/products. If you create enough awareness, end-consumers will eventually buy your products. Generally, brands/companies with millions of dollars in advertising operate at the top end of the funnel due to financial resources they have at their disposal. At the bottom of the funnel there are low end marketers whose sole goal is to find right customers and make immediate sale.

Other mediums like TV, Out of the home, Print (big magazines not newspapers) have top of the funnel advertisers pouring millions of dollars. Due to nature of the medium, you don't know who is watching/viewing your ad (targeting is very limited). So they engage in creating awareness and eventually prospective customers.

In digital medium, it's easy to track who is going to be end-user so low-end of the marketers came into play where you mostly get banner ads like deals, discount offers to make sale immediately.

Unfortunately, digital advertising ecosystem so far has built around low-end marketers as customers. Due to this advertising on digital sucks. Banners are terrible way to advertising for big brands who are not particularly interested in immediate sale. Result- we haven't seen big brands doing huge campaigns in digital arena. The share of digital advertising in overall advertising pie is very small.

To cater, low-end marketers we have crazy level of targeting and people feel violated when it comes to privacy.

Innovation (to address aforementioned problems) is happening in digital advertising, albeit at much slower pace. We are seeing new ways of advertising. Video is attracting bigger brands who are interested in creating awareness. There are some other interesting solutions popping up (we are building one, sorry for shameless plug) where by catering to different set of customers with different objectives we don't have to build user behaviors by doing crazy data mining. I'm optimistic, as big brands and top end of the funnel advertisers come into the play, we won't need crazy targeting and invasion of our privacy. Don't forget digital advertising in current state is utterly broken and everyone inside industry knows, we will definitely see much better solutions in next couple of years.

References: [1] Purchase Funnel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel [2] Understanding the funnel: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/understandin...

It's a lot more than 105 companies.

But I always hated the word tracking for them. They fall into many different categories. Some companies collect behavioral data, others personally identifiable information, others bring offline info online, some are seen across various sites but only because they are integrated in other services. So they aren't necessarily tracking you but partnering with one that is.

Also a lot of these are the backbone of ad:tech which powers the free services people use daily.

Now some of them are definitely not necessary and worthy of blocking, so really it comes down to what privacy means to you. Personally I'm fine with most, but many people are not.

Just remember the old overused phrase does stand true. If you're not paying for it, you are the product.

Might I note that, as you read that article, The Atlantic itself is using similar advertising and likely has the majority of those 105 companies on its site? :D

Not blaming them, they need those ad dollars to keep their site running too!