Last week, the results were released from a recent USA Today/Gallup poll of U.S. internet users about their views of online tracking for ad targeting.  As I have written about recent governmental discussions of a proposed “Do-Not-Track” system, it seemed worth looking at this new poll and see if it helps to shed any additional light on the issue.

There were two major questions asked during the poll.

When asked “Should advertisers be allowed to match ads to your specific interests, based on websites you have visited?” 67% of respondents were not big fans of the idea.

The follow up question “Are these methods justified because they keep costs down so users can visit websites for free, or are they not justified because free access is not worth the invasion of privacy involved?” produced a similar 61% or respondents saying that they don’t believe free access to sites is a fair tradeoff for being tracked online.

If you take survey data at face value, this certainly shows that the majority of internet users in this poll are not big fans of online tracking and don’t think it is worth putting up with in order to get free access to websites.  Earlier this month, I mentioned in a blog post that I thought most internet users would have a generally negative feeling about online tracking in general (without any real context provided to them about all the aspects of online tracking).  However, I also suggested that if given more information about what online tracking was used for (to deliver relevant ads, to allow sites to recognize returning visitors, etc.) that most internet users would actually have a more positive reaction.

The survey does back up the idea that most internet users aren’t very big on the general idea of being tracked online.  But, I think this is pretty much what most of us in the online marketing industry would have expected.  I think the answer to the second question is more interesting.  The USA Today/Gallup poll focused on “free access to websites” as the main benefit provided to internet users in exchange for having their online behavior tracked.  The implied alternative is that if online behavior isn’t being tracked, then users would have to pay for access to various websites (that they now visit for free).  However, even though respondents may say that this tradeoff isn’t justified, I wonder how many would really be willing to pay to access many of their regularly visited websites, if a pay wall was put in place.

While I do think that internet users will pay for certain things online, access to a website or access to content (unless it is perceived as being extremely valuable) has rarely been popular.  People have come to expect the majority of the internet to be free to access.  If there was a sudden increase in pay sites, I’m not sure that internet users would happily change their habits and start paying up tomorrow to read the same type of information that they got for free yesterday.

If by opting out from online tracking, internet users were suddenly charged to access many of the sites they visit (even if the charges were small), I wonder how they would react and how many would actually opt out, once they understood the trade off.  My feeling is that internet users would not be at all happy with a sudden influx of more pay sites.

Of course, internet users already have some fairly simple ways to reduce or eliminate online tracking.  Simply by changing their privacy setting in IE to not accept cookies, internet users can remove themselves from the majority of simple online tracking programs.  Making this change doesn’t require any significant knowledge of computers.  Yet, very few people actually bother to take this easy step.  This fact continue to make me think that at the end of the day, most internet users aren’t really all that concerned about online tracking.

Filed under: Industry News by Tom Wozniak