April 20th, 2007
Google, YouTube double down on user tracking: DoubleClick next up
Do you want Google to track, record and archive, on their servers, every move you make on the Web? Google is betting that you do with its new "Web History" Web activity "manager":
View and search across the full text of the pages you've visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories.
What will GOOGLE do with all the "Web History" personal information it tracks, records and archives, on their servers? Who knows.
Google is in top (not so) privacy form in its vague, all is Googley good Web History "Privacy FAQ":
In order to provide the service, Web History saves information about your web activity, including pages you visit and searches on Google. Over time, the service may use additional information about your activity on Google or other information you provide us in order to deliver a better search experience.
Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations. In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services.
How else will it provide such a "seamless" experience across the Google Web?
Cookies were not served at yesterday’s Google Q1 earnings call report to Wall Street, but watch out when the DoubleClick deal closes, as I dissect in Google to tag users across Web: Privacy Boomerang?
Google was asked about how it would work with DoubleClick cookie data, but did not respond.
Co-founder Larry Page underscored, however, that Google is “really excited” about improving targetability and the “kinds of information you need to really provide good information to everybody involved in the process”:
I think we're excited about our ability, our technological strength and how it can be applied to some of those issues. We're not ready to go into any specifics on that yet.
Google’s YouTube though is well under way to exploit the “real-time focus group” that is YouTube,” all day and every day.
I heard Suzie Reider, YouTube’s marketing exec, lay out a plan on Monday for capitalizing on YouTube’s extensive knowledge of what users do at the site and how they interact with YouTube’s hosted videos.
"We'll never have had that much data about that much content," Reider shared with marketers at the Advertising Research Foundation conference in New York City:
By Q3 we'll have a tremendous amount of metrics and data around every video. There's lots you can glean from looking at who's looking at what.
Who will be looking at what YouTubers look at?
Advertisers that are willing to pay YouTube for the privilege of concocting “authentic connections” with the YouTube “community.”
Reiders' YouTube commitment to mine YouTuber data on behalf of advertisers repsonds to marketers' demands.
Last November, on the heels of the Google buyout, I heard Reider at AdTech NYC express frustration that advertisers did not have absolute faith in the YouTube marketing opportunity, without backup metrics.
Although Reider has close to 20 years media experience, she expressed dismay that marketers ask for quantitative evidence of the worth of the YouTube clip culture, such as a “Dynamic Logic” marketing effectiveness study. Five months later, Reider is firmly on the YouTube's got user data bandwagon. What's more, Google's YouTube user activity information will soon be an open (video) book, to the highest bidder that is!
ALSO: Google CEO upholds YouTube copyright infringing business model and Google buys Marratech e-meeting startup: Nerd paradise?
