We were recently approached by a well-known ad network, with an interesting proposition.

They offered to pay us for providing an anonymized global user identifier - a hashed email address or phone number for each user. Anonymized, one-way hashed, so they don’t get the actual email or number, but using their hash so they can cross reference with their other publishers, for global user tracking across properties, apps or sites.

To sweeten this deal, they also offer to provide us with free extended user data, based on the submitted GUID. (demo, CPG, lifestyle, 100+ segments) and use behavioral targeting, across their entire network, to optimize our ad-targeting.

And here is the very interesting bit - based on the GUID, they can now give us the ability to sell inventory against our audience across their entire network - even when the user is on another publisher’s property.

I hear there are a couple of other networks doing this same thing - anyone else seeing this trend?