Is Marsha Blackburn and her ‘BROWSER’ privacy bill the biggest threat to our Connected Society investment theme?
Tennessee Congresswoman Martha Blackburn says she wants to give consumers control of their internet experience.She’s introduced a bill — the “BROWSER Act” — that would require internet users to actively opt in to say yes to any sort of ad tracking or online-data collection.To the online-advertising industry, what Blackburn is proposing could drop a huge hammer on business. And, they say, consumers would be hurt.”Facebook won’t be free,” said Scott Howe, CEO of the data company Acxiom.
Read Full Article on Business Insider: ‘BROWSER’ privacy bill in Congress faces opposition from ad industry – Business Insider
For those of us that haven’t quite made it to the end of the “internet” and consumed all of it yet, we might need to pick up the pace as the prevalence of “paywalls” could be on the rise. That’s at least one of the possible unintended consequences of a bill Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn is pushing for.
The “Browser Act” could be a major blow to those pieces of our Connected Society investment theme that rely on advertising revenues as their primary business model. With terms like “ad-tracking” and “data-collection” being named in the bill, which hit a hot button with consumers, the public opinion is probably going to be very supportive of this move. However, what these two terms are directly driving at are what is called “Programmatic Advertising”, and according to eMarketer, “four of every five US digital display dollars will transact programmatically in 2017, totaling $32.56 billion.”
This bill also comes at a time when, under the guise of “tax reform”, current Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady recently acknowledged that there “may be a need” to look at some of the revenue raisers to complete his 2017 tax reform proposal. One item was revisiting the idea to convert advertising from being a fully deductible business expense – as it has been for over a century – to just half deductible, with the rest being amortized over the course of a decade. Gulp!
Do we see the end of ad-driven websites? No. At the end of the day, advertisers need to get their message in front of consumers, and newspapers and billboard advertising campaigns aren’t coming back in vogue anytime soon. What is likely going to happen is the famous advertising quote could be coming into place in this data-driven online advertising world: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
