Last year, the company’s traffic more than doubled. It has done this with no creepy surveillance: All it does is use whatever keywords you type in the search bar—“best inkjet printer,” “Boston hotels”—to customize an ad for that search. This is known as “contextual” targeting, distinct from the secret-police “behavioral” tracking that fuels advertising on many tech platforms and creates a mammoth dossier of your online activity. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even retain your search info. Every time you load the search engine, you’re a stranger.
Indeed, DuckDuckGo’s success suggests, more trenchantly, that a lot of Silicon Valley’s business argument about data harvesting is flat-out wrong. They say they need to do it to produce compelling products: Personalizing their wares helps keep us maximally “engaged,” and thus rakes in advertising money. Yet here’s a tech firm that avoided practicing surveillance capitalism; it just practices regular capitalism.
Even some ad buyers are questioning whether endless tracking works; a survey by Digiday found that 45 percent of ad execs saw “no significant benefit” from behavioral tracking, and 23 percent found it made revenues decline.
See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/tech-companies-dont-need-to-be-creepy-to-make-money/