travel service: Ann Coulter's Cookies And Pixels

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Ann Coulter's Cookies And Pixels - Business Insider

Visitors to conservative pundit Ann Coulter's web site should prepare to be aggressively tracked by advertisers, according to a spreadsheet listing the cookies and tracking pixels on her site, which was sent to us by an advertising industry source.

The source asked not to be named, but said that a "reasonable" number of cookies and pixles on a mainstream media site would be 10-15. (Cookies and pixels are tiny bits of software that web sites use to track your web browser, help with logins, and to allow advertisers to target users based on their history of browsing.)

Coulter, however, allows as many as 164 cookies and pixels from more than 57 companies, our source tells us. We tweeted at Coulter to see if she has a comment. We'll update this item if she responds.

The source said in an email:

We subscribe to a service that tells us when some of the top couple thousand websites add new retargeting partners. We happened to see "anncoulter.com" show up on the tracking for the first time on Jan 18th 2013.

Upon visiting, I have seldom seen as many pixels firing and cookies being set as I did on this site, and some of the names of these pieces of code reveal a little bit about what is going on - "Republican Party Mobilization". It looks like the visitors to her site are being sold out six ways from Sunday, and retargeted, shared, and whatever all over the web so that conservatives can be found and remarketed to ceaselessly. All kinds of swapping of unique user IDs etc. over 57 companies and hundreds of calls.

For comparison, RachelMaddow.com (the site of the liberal MSNBC host) had zero cookies. The New York Times has 10 and Business Insider has 12, on the day our source looked at all four sites.

To be fair to Coulter, her site is doing nothing wrong. There's nothing sinister about offering your inventory to every available network. But it suggests her inventory isn't managed well ? everyone is welcome to buy on it, regardless of how low quality the clients or the bids are. (Two current clients are weight loss companies, for instance.) There tends to be an inverse relationship between the quality of a site's audience and the number of pixels and cookies firing from it. Publishers whose content is highly desired limit the number of buyers to only the most high-quality bidders.

Our source said a virtual "who's who of ad tech" were at work on AnnCoulter.com. Among the names of the devices tracking Coulter fans are (emphasis added):

http://a.triggit.com/px?u=6b0d6bd6f97d6817&rtv=RepublicanPartyMobilization
http://seg.sharethis.com/socialOptimizationPixel.php?campaign=RT-MR_Mobilization
http://tags.bluekai.com/site/2554?ret=html&phint=Prepackage%3DGovernment%20and%20Politics&phint=__bk_k%3D&phint=__bk_pr%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fbcp.crwdcntrl.net%2F5%2Fc%3D1411%2Frand%3D330100493%2Fpv%3Dy%2Fp%3D3934%2Fp%3D3935%2Fdp%3Dy%2Frt%3Difr&phint=__bk_l%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fbcp.crwdcntrl.net%2Fpx%3FYz0xNDEzJnB4aWQ9NjQ3MSwxNzkwNCwyNjk3OCw2Mzk3LDY0MzcsMjI5NTQsMTYyNDksMTc2MjYsMTk2NjAsNjQyOSZweGxpbT0x&limit=1&r=8329555

You can download a PDF of the full file here, but here's a sample of the list:

Accuen Media 1
Adap.TV 3
AdBrite 4
AddThis 9
Adify 1
Admeld 1
AdShuffle 5
AdTech (adserver) 3
Aggregate Knowledge 1
AppNexus 6
AudienceIQ 2
BlueKai 3
Brilig 4
ChoiceStream 2
CrowdControl 12
Datonics 1
Demdex 4
Doubleclick 4
DoubleVerify 2
Drawbridge 1
Exelate 1
Flashtalking 7
Google 5
Google Analytics 1
i-behavior 1
IntentMedia 1
Intermarkets 5
InviteMedia (Google) 3
IXI Corporation 2
Lijit (Federated Media) 1
LiveRamp 4
Lotame 1
Media6Degrees 1
MediaMath 2
MIG (Media Innovation Group) 3
NexAction 1
OpenX 2
Pubmatic 1
Pulpo Media 1
PulsePoint 1
Quantcast 1
Reson8 2
Right Media (Yahoo!) 4
Rocketfuel 1
Rubicon Project 15
Scorecard Research (comScore) 2
ShareThis 1
SpotXchange 2
Tacoda (AOL) 1
Tapad 1
TargusINFO 2
Tidal.TV 2
Triggit 1
TubeMogul 1
Turn 12
Veruta 1