Clickshare benefits to publishers and advertisers

An example (taken from the newspaper industry)

Without Clickshare, a West Coast subscriber who "clicks " to information at the East Coast paper will be refused access unless the user agrees to a a second $5-a-month East Coast enrollment. This is the World Wide Web today -- multiple registrations and enrollments.

With Clickshare running on the servers of both papers, the West Coast user can be "served " information in real time from the East Coast newspaper. Additional charges are aggregated and settled as additional fees to the user's account at the West Coast newspaper.

This service produces simultaneous benefits:

1. FOR THE USER: The benefit of a single ID for all Clickshare-enabled information access and settlement to a single billing account. Browser-software independence.

2. FOR THE WEST COAST PUBLISHER: An opportunity to provide a gateway to non-owned content at a fellow Clickshare Publishing Member, and a chance to vend to its user information purchased at wholesale but with the ability to profit by applying any form of retail markup (or to vend without fees at all).

3. FOR THE EAST COAST PUBLISHER: A way to sell information to an unaffiliated user, be assured of payment, and do so at no incremental cost beyond small transaction fees.

4. FOR THE ADVERTISER: Using an audience-measurement vendor who analyzes data acquired through Clickshare, a way to study user movements across Clickshare-enabled web sites that permits apples-to-apples comparisons of marketing effectiveness.

Using Clickshare, Publishing Members can:

PROVIDE TRUE THIRD-PARTY VALIDATION OF WEB USAGE.Other systems rely upon server logs maintained by the publisher. The Clickshare service acquires per-query page-access records in real time and stores them in a central service which cannot be tampered with. Services which claim to validate "hits " by looking at publisher serving logs are applying a loose definition of the term "validate. " In the print publishing world, there are many ways to "test audit " the physical distribution of a newspaper or magazine. Such options are not available when transferring digital information. So the collection and authentication of user activity as it happens becomes crucial.

DIFFERENTIATE EYEBALLS, NOT JUST COUNT THEM. Clickshare users are provided with unique identication numbers which are recorded no matter where they travel for information around the Internet's Clickshare-enabled sites. So a publisher learns not just how may times a page was viewed, but also how many times a particular user viewed that page. Each access record shows the anonymous ID of the user who accessed the page as well as the Publishing Member who "owned " that user. Other "hit counting " implementations can achieve this level of individual-user analysis only by maintaing a huge database of names and addresses -- with all the problems of privacy and scalability that implies.

RESPECT PERSONAL PRIVACY AND RESPECT THE PUBLISHER-SUBSCRIBER RELATIONSHIP. Clickshare Corp. never possesses the names or personal demographic information of users. This information is acquired by individual publishers and remains only on their computers (or on computers of a third-party processing house). The Clickshare backend database contains only anonymous user ID numbers. When these are distributed to publishers periodically for billing, only the individual publishers are capable of matching an ID by name to an actual user. It is then up to the publisher, based upon the nature of its relationship with its own users, to decided if and how that information will be used or sold. A publisher who chooses to commercialize its user relationship will have the ability to track in complete detail the site visitation habits of its users. Central to Clickshare's role as an independent, third-party is our avoidance of any involvement in that relationship.

PROVIDE DATA TO OTHER TRACKING SERVICES. Clickshare tracking data is acquired and stored in industry-standard database formats that it can be provided to other web-activity tracking services for aggregation. For example, a major advertiser might wish to obtain aggregate "hit " data for its advertisements running on multiple Clickshare-enhanced sites. With Clickshare's open-standards reporting facilities, pages with the advertiser's material can be identified system-wide and a report provided to the advertiser sorted by publishing member or by geographic market area.

EVALUATE ADVERTISING EFECTIVENESS. Some of the questions which an advertiser could answer with sorted Clickshare data include:

• From which part of the country is interest in our advertising message strongest?
• How does that correlate with sales?
• Which web site shows the most number of "views " of our advertisement per dollar spent?
• What percentage of users from a given site seek product literature?
• Does the same consumer view the ad more than once?
• At what time of day is the ad most likely to be viewed?