Esther Dyson’s column in the WSJ entitled “The Coming Ad Revolution” got my attention at first mainly because it mentioned the ISP targeting companies “NebuAd, Project Rialto, Phorm, Frontporch and Adzilla” about which not too much (yet) has been written in the mainstream press. As they work to try to sign up ISPs, these firms still face many of the same problems that have bedeviled “behavioral targeting” companies - related to the size of the user footprint they can reach, and how often they will see the user return. By working with an ISP versus an individual site, they greatly reduce the frequency problem and also the issues caused by users unhelpfully deleting their cookies (or having a spyware program do so) every few weeks. On the other hand they still have to crunch a lot of data very quickly to be able to push relevant messages out to users.

Yahoo! should have been the king of behavioral user targeting with all the visitation and search data they have about users, visitation patterns across multiple properties and so on but they by most accounts have failed to come up with much that is truly compelling in this area. Partly a problem of their antiquated adserving technology, perhaps? Several talented Yahoo!’s from this area have left the company e.g. Richard Frankel who recently left to become COO of SocialMedia.

But back to the Dyson article - I disagree with:

What might seem like a horribly complex and tedious task to their elders — categorizing “friends,” managing news feeds, handling intersecting communities of contacts — feels natural to the Facebook users of today. They want more granularity of control, not less.

People don’t use a network like Facebook in the same way nor do they have equivalent expectations about privacy (some thought Beacon was great, many thought it wasn’t). A web product has to have enough common features and bits so that you can deliver information to the user within some known bounds, but also provide enough buttons and dials to be able to configure it for an individual in such a way that it meets their needs. The configurability of a product and the instant appeal, ease of use and “gettability” of it are often at odds. It is also a bit more complex when you think about adding tweaks to an existing product where there is already a history of use, the needs and reactions of the user base to past changes are measurable and somewhat predictable versus designing for new users you hope will flock to your platform. Stepping outside of the average Facebook user of today (age 22 in the US) to the more mainstream demographics Facebook’s valuation is based on (reaching eventually via some type of advertising), we may find a much lower tolerance for having to very granularly tweak the product to get it to work properly.

In general, people don’t change default settings. That’s why things like HDTV LCD TVs typically come with pretty good standard factory settings. Sure the superuser is going to tweak stuff, but as Microsoft told me several years ago when I was researching browser defaults “95% of people don’t change the default settings”. People do tweak things more than they used to, but I believe the complexity of setting up all kinds of rules to coordinate products, advertising and events between me and my friends will prove cumbersome and be enough of a hassle that it won’t happen for quite some time. The “preference plumbing” that will enable these decisions to be made more quickly and easily is hard and will take time. Ironically, Facebook’s sugardaddy Microsoft has long been beating the drum on “[enabling] applications and services to cooperate on consumers’ behalf” but I don’t think we’re that much further along than when they were talking about Hailstorm in 2001.

There is a lot of interest in user-based targeting right now, a good deal of money being thrown behind online advertising companies and applications, but both in terms of infrastructure and coordination, we’re still a long way from an Ad Revolution.