How Much Data Do Websites Collect? A Lot

It’s a no-brainer that targeting, in all its forms, is getting huge play on the Internet these days. Ad networks are springing up all over, each promising to deliver the right consumer at the right point in time.

Still, it’s an eye-opener to read in The New York Times that Yahoo and its ad networks collected data on Internet users an average of 2,500 times PER PERSON in December. You probably thought Google was the biggest collector of data, but it gathered information “just” 578 times in the month.

The figures do not include data that people publicly post on social networking sites or blogs. It’s based on search queries, page views and video views, among other things.

It’s curious that comScore was so involved in assisting the NY Times in this story.  They did the original analysis for the paper. (All you metrics geeks can click on the graphic links to the left of the article for more charts and a full spreadsheet of numbers.)

What isn’t discussed much in the article is that data can have varying degrees of value to marketers. A page impression may have low value, but a search query may be even more valuable. But the article and data do show why ad networks are such a hot commodity these days. The more information they have, the more valuable they may be.