It's about Harvesting the Data

read more at Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog
"In the offline world, publishers market their own subscriber lists. But online that data is harvested by a host of third parties such as Google’s DoubleClick, Microsoft’s Atlas and vast ad networks such as Platform A’s Advertising.com. “People are stealing from the media companies who have lost control of their data,” said Operative CEO Mike Leo. “It doesn’t make sense to me that the people creating these valuable audiences aren’t getting paid for it.”

Before going any further, let’s get this out of the way: The problem that media companies are just waking up to is that we have given away this user data without remuneration, because we were too preoccupied to investigate what was really taking place in the back end of the Web. Media folks are front end people. We look at the finished product, but the Web is all about the back end. This has to change, folks, or we’ll just continue to get hammered by people who know what it’s all about."