Rob Berrisford.com

I was reading this morning on the Beeb about Sir Tim Berners-Lee saying that customers need to be protected from internet tracking systems. Stating he didn’t want anyone knowing his history or what he bought ect.

I am not sure how much gravity Berners-Lee holds now a days but if his ideas caught on it could be worrying times for any acquisition based online model with particular reference to affiliate.

Affiliate would obviously be the first to be hit, without tracked sales the industry doesn’t exist. Other areas of online marketing would survive, though not to the same level of success. CPM and pure PPC could continue without any decent tracking, though I am sure costs would spiral. Most PPC agencies do track properly anyway so that wouldn’t be too much of a problem.

I understand users worry about the use of their information and it would be difficult to convince the vast majority of internet users that this information is only used to pay the relevant people rather than keep tabs on them in a big brother style.

The real question in will it happen?

My suspicion is no, I think you have to look at who holds the keys to these changes?

The Traffic

Google, yahoo, msn, obviously the big boys, would gain no advantage from this, in fact it would cause them some major problems.

The Access

Firefox and IE, again this would cause problems for them, and they would get huge amounts of pressure from the advertisers. Plus have you noticed it is still quite difficult for users to find out which cookies are on their machine?

The Money

The Advertisers, they will obviously not be happy about going back to the old school when you didn’t have a clue what you were spending your money on and if it was working.

I think there will be reforms, I think the big data owners will have to agree on a policy for using this information but without some sort of data on users behavior the internet as we know it wouldn’t exist, let alone affiliate marketing.

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