Who Would Suffer The Most And Least Under Do Not Track

While many major publishers, ad networks and ad agencies have been united in their opposition to the idea of a Federal Trade Commission’s “Do Not Track” button, not all of these players would be impacted equally if Do Not Track were to be implemented.

Publishers still rely mostly on contextual ads on their sites, while Do Not Track would cause the most disruption in the world of behavioral targeted advertising. Who relies most on that behavioral data? The ad networks that sell it to the ad agencies, and, to a lesser degree, the ad agencies themselves that use it to promise their clients greater effectiveness. Where publishers feel Do Not Track would hurt them most is in disrupting their internal ad settings, things like “frequency caps,” which allow a publisher to limit the same ad users might see as they navigate the site and are based in cookies. Also, they feel that eliminating those cookies would make their sites more annoying to users -- who wants to sign in to a site everytime? -- and would reduce their traffic and time spent on the site and ultimately hurt them that way. But agencies and advertisers and ad networks have the most to lose.