They’d rather make money from subscriptions, instead of paying for tracking technology
A bold move from the New York Times: they are going to stop using tracking pixels from Facebook and Twitter, and use their own marketing tool instead.
☝️ How this new marketing tool works: instead of tracking users all over their site, they will look at how well certain articles perform:
- They will promote articles on Facebook and Twitter
- Use a machine learning algorithm to see who seems to like those promoted articles the most.
- Show those people more articles that are similar, in the hopes that they then subscribe
- It’s called TAFI (Twitter and Facebook interface), and will work with other platforms in the future (Reddit, Snapchat, etc).
Actually, this kind of advertising sounds pretty standard, and — even though it uses technology to be efficient — seems far less intrusive. It’s a basic recommendation model that powers that famous phrase: “you may also like…”. But with one bonus feature: no tracking.
What this actually means for the New York times
They save money that they would otherwise spend on tracking technologies — tracking users is expensive, and arguably not that fruitful. The times even stopped using ad exchanges for their European pages after the GDPR came into effect, and still made money.
They will also greatly lessen their participation in behavioural targeting, a method used all over the internet to understand how people behave, so that advertisers can guess (or even change) what they might do next. This kind of digital advertising is used on a mass scale, and many argue it takes away our autonomy.
✨ Ultimately, this is a great thing ✨The New York Times are clearly positioning themselves as an organisation who think about data privacy in a meaningful way — these are concrete steps towards breaking the ugly cycle of the seemingly perpetual tracking of users online.
Georgia Iacovou
Content Writer