Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Ann Coulter Has Hundreds Of User-Tracking Devices On Her Website Right Now
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.
This source requested anonymity and noted that a "reasonable" number of these tracking devices on a mainstream media website is about 10-15. The source reported:
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.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ann-coulters-cookies-and-pixels-2013-2#ixzz2L4sWwUsG
7 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I mean, really.....
