Hey, we’ve all got to hustle for a buck. Even Daily Kos. But at least be a little more up-front about it to the people that provide the site visits and volunteer most of the site content.
When you come to Daily Kos, there are presently 22 pixels, web bugs, beacons and tags that are watching your online behavior. For comparison, presently HuffPo has 2, Alternet has 5, CNN International has 6, FoxNews has 11, and MSNBC has 5.
I don’t mind being whored out when I visit a website; but at least don’t let me find out the extent of the whoring out on my own.
From Ghostery, here are the companies looking at you as you look at Daily Kos:
- Blogads
How they describe themselves:
"Blog ads helps thousands of ad buyers. Whether an agency or an advertiser,it helps to execute campaigns that rock."
Application Owner: Pressflex LLC.
Nemetvolgyi ut 8.
Budapest, Hungary
- Google Adsense
How they describe themselves:
"Google AdSense enables website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads and earn revenue."
- Google Analytics
How they describe themselves:
"Enterprise-class web analytics made smarter, friendlier and free. Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you're more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web."
- OpenAds
How they describe themselves:
"OpenX is a popular free ad server used to manage the advertising on over 100,000 websites in more than 100 countries around the world."
- Quantcast
How they describe themselves:
"Quantcast is a new breed of audience service, focused on helping buyers and sellers quantify the real-time characteristics of digital media consumers against which they can activate addressable advertising solutions. Quantcast provides publishers, marketers and agencies unmatched capabilities to measure, organize, discover and transact based on directly-measured traffic and inferred audience data."
- ChartBeat
How they describe themselves:
"Chartbeat offers a real-time dashboard that shows how many people are on your site at any given moment, where they are, where they're coming from, and what they're doing. Chartbeat constantly receives information about your users and we show you if they're reading, writing or idle. We also monitor twitter and blogs for comments about your brand"
- Doubleclick
How they describe themselves:
"DoubleClick is a provider of digital marketing technology and services. The world's top marketers, publishers and agencies utilize DoubleClick's expertise in ad serving, rich media, video, search and affiliate marketing to help them make the most of the digital medium."
- Microsoft Atlas
How they describe themselves:
"With Microsoft search advertising, you create your adCenter account, define your target market, and set an ad budget. You can easily import your search campaign, pay on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, and access over 40 million unique users."
- Casale Media
How they describe themselves:
"Casale Media provides advertisers with direct access to the highest quality media inventory on the web. We supplement our media offering with a comprehensive suite of technologies and services that deliver, track and optimize online advertising campaigns for maximum response. Whether your goal is to increase brand lift or to generate on-the-spot sales, we can put together a media program that is precisely crafted to your needs."
- Comscore Beacon
How they describe themselves:
"VoiceFive Networks is a market research company that studies and reports on trends and behavior across a wide variety of topics. VoiceFive Networks is commissioned to conduct research on numerous topics of concern to industry leaders in diverse fields, including travel, pharmaceuticals, and publishing. We protect the anonymity and privacy of our survey participants, in accordance with leading privacy regulations. VoiceFive Networks does not provide personally identifiable information (PII) about survey participants to our clients, and we do not deliver – or facilitate the delivery of – advertising messages to survey participants. VoiceFive Network's surveys and other market research studies are used to compile reports that allow companies across industries to improve their services by better understanding the likes and dislikes of consumers. Marketers employ VoiceFive Networks to carry out a variety of projects including attitude and usage studies, discrete choice analyses and recall studies, just to name a few. Editors Note: Comscore Beacon operates under multiple stealth names such as VoiceFive Networks and Secure Studies."
- Omniture
How they describe themselves:
"Omniture SiteCatalyst® provides marketers with actionable, real-time intelligence about online strategies and marketing initiatives. SiteCatalyst helps marketers quickly identify the most profitable paths through their Web site, determine where visitors are navigating away from their site, and identify critical success metrics for online marketing campaigns. SiteCatalyst is part of the Omniture Online Business Optimization Suite."
- Tacoda
How they describe themselves:
"TACODA, Inc., a wholly owned division of AOL and a Platform-A company, runs one of the world's largest and most advanced behavioural targeting advertising networks."
- Zedo
How they describe themselves:
"ZEDO is an Internet ad serving company that has been offering a variety of products and services to top web sites, advertisers and networks since 1999. ZEDO's Third Generation Ad Serving\u2122 technology is designed to help web sites, advertisers and networks lower their operating costs and increase their revenue. Currently, the technology serves over 25 billion ads a month for hundreds of sites and leads the industry in scalability, ease of use and features."
- Collective Media
How they describe themselves:
"Not Just Another Ad Network. Let Collective Bring First-class Advertisers to You. Any ad network can help unload your extra inventory. Collective can add value and establish longer term benefits to both your inventory and your brand. Our approach is more like yours, placing the highest quality, most appropriate advertisers on your site, boosting everybody's brand, respecting your audience and maximizing revenue. Collective's renowned suite of targeting capabilities, our highly selective standards for advertising, and our advanced optimization not only yields the highest value for your inventory, we also elevate your brand with quality, relevant advertisers. Targeting like no other. Our comprehensive targeting capabilities are unrivaled in the industry. Not only do we have the premiere technology for content, contextual and behavioral segmentation, we have the expertise to make the most of it."
- Mindset Media
How they describe themselves:
"Mindset Media puts ad technology to work for brands. Only Mindset Media lets advertisers define their targets on 21 standard elements of personality and then reach those targets on a mass scale in simple online media buys. Use our proprietary ad targeting technology to reach millions of people with the Mindsets that matter to your brand."
- MSN Ads
How they describe themselves:
"With Microsoft search advertising, you create your adCenter account, define your target market, and set an ad budget. You can easily import your search campaign, pay on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, and access over 40 million unique users."
- Real Media
How they describe themselves:
"The first company to integrate web site analytics, behavioral targeting, and ad serving. The only company to integrate paid search, natural search, and feed management. Cutting-edge technology for clients that like to push the envelope. Whatever digital marketing strategy you pursue, we’ll have the technology to get you there."
- BlueKai
How they describe themselves:
"By aggregating valuable shopping and research behaviors across the Internet, BlueKai is building the world's largest database of intentions. The BlueKai Data Exchange enables partners to buy and own data to boost ad targeting across any media. Publishers can also participate as data sellers to increase revenue in a privacy friendly way. Unlike ad networks, BlueKai does not sell ads or impressions. Our goal is to create a more effective online marketing approach that is driven by intent data and advocacy for consumer participation. The result? A harmonious equation where effective and profitable marketing becomes a polite answer to a consumer need."
- Burst Media
How they describe themselves:
"Burst Media works for independent web publishers to provide advertising representation, services, and technology across the broadest and deepest number of interest-based web sites online."
- RightMedia
How they describe themselves:
"The Right Media Exchange is a holistic solution for managing your ad business-from full ad serving, to business development, to business expansion. Founded in 2003, Right Media is a Yahoo! company based in New York, with offices in London, Moscow, Eugene, San Francisco and Tallahassee."
- interCLICK
How they describe themselves:
"interCLICK is ready to meet your digital advertising challenges by helping you reach the right consumers online and attracting the right marketers to your site. For advertisers and the agencies that serve them, we bring innovative solutions, the highest level of service and a collection of the best, most well known and trusted websites in the media business. What is InterCLICK? InterCLICK is a truly transparent online advertising network. Unlike some of its competitors however, InterCLICK only focuses on premium website partnerships. By leveraging unparalleled targeting, massive reach and full disclosure, InterCLICK’s goal is to provide advertisers and agencies with superior bottom line results. Why is transparency important to me if all I care about is results? At InterCLICK, we believe that important business decisions start with having the right data. By knowing which targeting techniques and which sites work best for your campaign, you begin to better understand your audience. Knowing who your users, which sites they go to, what their mindset is empowers you to make better long term business decisions."
- ValueClick Mediaplex
How they describe themselves:
"ValueClick Mediaplex is the leading single-source provider of interactive marketing solutions spanning all major Internet marketing channels - web, e-mail, search and affiliate marketing."