About

Tracking protection is like bandwidth: you can usually make more money on the Internet when other people have it. While most of the IT industry is chasing the surveillance marketing bubble, tracking protection is a new software category, with opportunites to build. While most tracking protection projects are focused on end users, sites and brands also need tracking protection help.

High-reputation web sites can do better with a tracking-protected audience. If your site reviews cars, third-party firms are tracking car intenders to show them car ads on cat GIF sites. Tracking doesn't just make users less trusting of the web in general, but, worse, it artifically inflates the number of impressions available, destroys signal, and lowers the value of impressions on high-quality sites.

As the print audience shrinks, brands need the web to grow up into an ad medium where brand advertising works better, and fraud works less well. So far, the web is the best contender to fill the vanishing brand-building niche of the magazine ad, but only after the web can fix its data leakage problem, and the fraud, malware, and signal loss that flow from it.

An individual site or brand can't protect users just by giving up its own connections to third-party trackers. Those users will still be tracked on other sites. Users need to get tracking protection at the browser or platform level. Just as an email newsletter can do better when a subscriber turns on well-run spam filter, a high-value web site or brand can gain from each tracking-protected audience member.

Fortunately, recommending and rewarding tracking protection for your site's audience and for your brand's customers can be simple. Getting started can be a one-line change, such as:

• linking to a tracking protection test that recommends tracking protection tools

• simplifying a privacy policy page to remove links to confusing opt-outs that drive users to ad blockers.

Other Aloodo-powered functionality can include bonus content for tracking-protected users.

Every user that a site or brand can help to protect starts paying off right away, not just as one more person not running an ad blocker, but more importantly in the form of reduced data leakage and fraud. And that user's tracking protection continues to pay off, in the form of reduced exposure to low-reputation ads, and increased opportunity for signal.

Ad blocking and ad fraud are commonly addressed as separate issues, but both stem from the problem of data leakage. More on the fraud problem: Thank you for buying fraudulent web ads.

More on site-friendly alternatives to ad blocking: Please Turn Off Your Ad Blocker is over.