Social networks and Web ad networks are — right now — defining the future of Web privacy and personalization, driven by concepts like social advertising and profile sharing.
Influential blogger Dave Winer cuts to the heart of the matter when it comes to the “balance of trust” between users and advertisers, which is really the key issue here, one that is being negotiated out across the Web right now. In a post asking for the ability to control his own personal data, Winer writes:
The leaders of Silicon Valley begrudgingly gave up their view of us as couch potatoes, now they think of us as generators of content they can put ads on (and pay us nothing). We still need to work on that respect thing.
Winer hits the nail on the head. The type of thinking he criticizes is a very heavy-handed grafting of old marketing values onto the new world of Web 2.0.
The Web 1.0 equivalent of this is email spam. Or SEO gamesmanship. It’s taking the golden goose and shooting it between the eyes for a quick meal.
What makes even bad, short-sighted ideas work on the Internet is sheer scale…spam works because if you send out several million emails for almost no cost, you’ll get some level of payback. Gaming search engines works because the pay off is so big and the chance of getting caught is low (and if you are caught, you simply move to the next shady tactic).
Billion dollar businesses — businesses built to last — aren’t built upon such short-sighted ideas. As Winer himself likes to say, the Internet “routes around” problems. If next-generation advertising fails to treat consumers with respect, users will find a way to route around that as well.
