Advertising Platform

Advertising without user tracking

Kurt Andro – December 31^st 2014

Brief description, objectives

Provide an advertising platform for people for whom the advertising industry is very close to secret services and criminals on the popularity scale, who would rather cut off their click fingers before clicking on an advertising banner, hide the advertising banners, social network buttons etc. by "tunnel vision" and who also try to avoid tracking as much as possible (e.g. by consciously choosing their devices, operating systems, browsers, add-ons etc. and their suitable configuration).

Starting position

The target group feels annoyed, harassed and persecuted by advertising through the constant and intrusive bombardment on TV, radio, in front of video clips, as banners, in search hit lists etc. Personalized advertising is rejected, as this means that someone has already collected and used personal data.

Assumptions

Parts of the target audience would look at advertising if they could decide for themselves when they want to see advertising, what exactly they want to see (e.g. if they want to buy a certain product, want to know what is available on the market and what different manufacturers offer), they could be sure that their activities cannot be tracked, so it cannot be assigned what they are interested in, the content would be less glamorous and more informative instead.

Solution

An alternative advertising platform with the following features

• Site consists exclusively of HTML and CSS.
• JavaScript and other methods for user identification and tracking are expressly and permanently waived. Even the page navigation consists only of common links.
• This is briefly described on a subpage and permanently guaranteed.
• For users, this is easily recognizable and verifiable, e.g. because NoScript does not "strike".
• The main page consists of advertising blocks that are positioned one below the other and each consist of three columns:
• Column 1: Tags, i.e. terms through which the advertised product can be found
• Column 2: Thumbnail of the advertising video, linked with the video clip
• Column 3: Links to manufacturer/provider website
• In the beginning, only one product page, the main page, is necessary.
• An integrated search function is omitted in order to make it clear that nothing can and should be recorded here either. The page can be searched for keywords using the browser search function (Ctrl + F), this must be indicated at the top of the page. (for "mainstream users" this might be an inconvenience, the target group expected here will certainly have no problem, they will appreciate it as an advantage).
• If the site is very successful and the main page becomes VERY long at some point, you could split it into "technical products" and "non-technical products" or "products" and "services", etc., depending on the current composition of the offer.
• Otherwise there are only very few subpages: site notice, contact - the usual.

Further considerations

For marketing people, it might initially seem unfamiliar and disadvantageous to have so few opportunities to monitor success. All they can do is count how often their clip is viewed from the advertising platform. You might have to first make it clear to them that this is exactly the point through which they can reach this additional user group in the first place.

You could use a "cheeky" URL that immediately makes it clear that this is a really alternative platform. Something like www.advertswithoutcrap.com or the like. Additionally maybe a short URL to make it easier to call up on smartphones.

Time and costs for creating and maintaining such a site would be moderate. You could therefore charge relatively low prices. Maybe staggered according to the time that such an advertising block would remain, e.g. 20 € for one month, 50 € for three months or similar.

A very small cost burden for the advertisers and therefore also no large barrier to try it with this for them new channel once. You could consider not charging a fee at all for the first few months after launch to quickly fill the site with content so that first visitors don't get the impression that the site is "dead".

The server load would be extremely low, because the videos would be streamed from the provider sites or from Youtube or the like.