Cookie Grumbling

David Schatsky | March 15, 2005, 12:03 PM

I'm pleased to see that Eric's recent report on the declining value of cookie-based measurement schemes has gotten a lot of play. It's an issue of great importance to our clients and to online businesses generally.

We don't envision a measurement doomsday, though Web sites and measurement vendors do need to take the message of this report seriously.

Some have reacted with skepticism to the consumer survey data we report. Seth Godin, whom I went to college with (he was famous on campus but he didn't know me) says our report should be filed under "stats that cannot be true":

Let's do a reality check here. This is the same population that can't get rid of pop ups, repeatedly falls for phishing of their Paypal and eBay accounts, still uses Internet Explorer, buys stuff from spammers, doesn't know what RSS is and sends me notes every day that say, "what's a blog?"

Forgive my skepticism, but it's inconceivable to me that 40% of the audience knows how to use their browser to erase their cookies.

We were skeptical too, which is why we asked these questions multiple times, in multiple ways, to different populations of online users. Our findings corroborated each other. They were also supported by a number of Web operators we spoke with who reported declining numbers of visitors (as measured by cookie-based schemes) even as other business metrics like orders did not decline. The popularity of Internet privacy and anti-spyware/adware tools on CNET's download.com and the rapid adoption of Firefox attests to the high profile that privacy has achieved among online users.

Skepticism is healthy. Ignorance is dangerous.