Clearstream Promises to...

A new startup called Clearstream  says it’s time to tame the “Wild West” of online video advertising. According to co-founder Brian Mandelbaum, the idea came from his time at ad agencies, including Razorfish and Saatchi & Saatchi. The problem, he says, is that there’s no good way to distinguish between high- and low-quality ad placements. When you buy space in a video ad network, that ad could be running before a video on a premium site, but it could also be stuck in a banner on a random website. “The advertiser is getting screwed,” Mandelbaum says. To bring more transparency to the industry, Clearstream has created a rating system for any site wanting to run video ads. Either the publisher can pay Clearstream for a certification, or an agency can require that a publisher get certified. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative evaluation, Mandelbaum says Clearstream gives two ratings, one for general quality, and one for relevance in a given content category, such as sports. Contrasting Clearstream with existing services, Mandelbaum says companies like Nielsen and comScore are interested in collecting data on who’s watching an ad. Clearstream, on the other hand, helps advertisers understand the “what, where, when, and how.” And while there are services for evaluating the brand-friendliness of a page, Mandelbaum says a web page can have little to do with the video that’s playing — which is why Clearstream applies ratings on a stream, publisher, and agency level. He also calls existing systems “almost extortion” where “the only person who wins is the verification company” — while with Clearstream, even the publisher benefits because they get data on how to make their video content more brand-friendly. When discussing his vision, Mandelbaum likes to focus on his agency background, but there’s another eye-catching item on his resume — he was a contestant on the fourth season of The Apprentice , getting fired during the eight episode. When asked about that experience, Mandelbaum gamely tries to connect it with his new startup, saying The Apprentice helped him learn how “to listen and to be able to build against what the community wants.”

FTC Stands Behind Self-...

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz spoke up for self-regulation of targeted advertising during a presentation at ad:tech New York on Tuesday. He stated that consumers must be given a choice as to how much of their personal data is tracked, but it’s up to the ad industry, not the government, to make it so. “We at the FTC have no interest in shutting down the Internet party,” he said. “Our only concern is that, if guests understand there could be a cover charge to the party [in the form of giving up some privacy], they should be able to make meaningful choices about how much they’ll pay.” This comes just as the Digital Advertising Alliance released an up-dated set of principles regarding online data collection. The new rules prohibit the use of online data as a means of determining medical care eligibility, credit or insurance eligibility or any employment-related decisions.  It also requires sites to adhere to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act rules when collecting data on children under 13 and it requires explicit permission to collect medical or pharmaceutical data. As much as this is a step in the right direction, privacy advocates fear it’s not enough mostly because Alliance membership is voluntary. If an ad network has no intention of following the rules, they don’t have to join the Alliance. And it’s not like consumers are going to limit their web surfing to sites that use only compliant networks. Networks that do agree to the rules then break them, could be subject to fines and further investigation by the FTC. The Accountability Program recently released their findings on their first cases . They say all six companies responded in a timely manner, changing their data collection policies within weeks of being notified of a problem. Liebowitz says that as long as the FTC sees the industry working together to prevent misuse of online data collection, they’ll stay on the sidelines. But if we can’t all play nice, then the government is ready to step in with new rules and laws that will apply to everyone, like it or not.

Gnip Now Delivers Over ...

Gnip , a provider of social media data to enterprise applications, is now delivering over 30 billion paid social activities per month to its customers. This is the largest number of paid social media activities that have ever been distributed in a 30 day period in Gnip’s history. For background, Gnip serves as an API hub for social streams, collecting data from services like Twitter, Facebook and other social sources, and pushing it out to other data-consuming applications and Websites. Applications using Gnip’s platform can get public data streams for over 100 feeds and sites, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, and now Google+ without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs. And Gnip also has premium access to the Twitter firehose of data. For basis of comparison, at the start of 2011, Gnip was delivering 300 million activities per month. By May, that number was up to 3 billion activities per month. And in October, Gnip delivered 30 billion activities. At this rate, Gnip says it will be be delivering 300 billion activities per month by March of next year. So what’s causing this increase in demand for social data? Gnip says that more customers are signing up to tap into and mine the social data stream. Second, Gnip says that there is major interest in the premium-access to the Twitter firehose. Hedge funds are using the data stream to drive trading strategies, business intelligence companies layering social data onto their existing structured data sources and more. And more customers are using multiples sources to enrich their product capabilities. Gnip’s CEO Jud Valeski explains that Gnip will be adding Twitter-like premium data source relationships with other social services in the near future. The company also plans to increase the ability for more complex filtration of social data streams.

FTC proposes online chi...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) outlined proposed changes to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) on Sept. 15 that would expand the law to impact companies collecting data from individuals under 13 years of age to serve behaviorally targeted ads online or via mobile devices.

Right to reply: Faceboo...

Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been collected and published on the net by a security consultant. Ron Bowes used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user's privacy settings.