Tracking Protection helps high-value sites

Posted May 29, 2015 19:27 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
In reply to: Speed and bandwidth improvements with Firefox Tracking Protection by pabs
Parent article: Speed and bandwidth improvements with Firefox Tracking Protection

Tracking protection is a win for high-value ad-supported sites. The subject of sites recommending tracking protection to users has come up on several lists, and I ended up writing this:

Your site can inform, nudge, or reward each user to turn on or install a tracking protection tool that works for his or her own browser.... Tracking protection discourages the forms of advertising that have negative externalities, and helps shift ad budgets to ads that have positive externalities.

Advertising in general has the power to support cultural goods. If you like William Gibson stories, thank an Omni magazine advertiser. But web advertising has, so far, been terrible at this. IMHO ad-supported content has a chance of working on the web, but only after we get enough of the user base out of the pool of commodity eyeballs.

Here's a quick tracking protection test that you can take to make sure you're protected (AdBlock Plus users are not, by default.