Corporate's reply came after a series of back-and-forth letters starting in late April. It filled my request reluctantly, according to a June 30 letter from Online Privacy Coordinator Kimberly Jaske. (My mail box service received her letter earlier this month, but I only picked it up recently.) Jaske wrote, in part:
"The statute is narrower than your letter suggests, and we still do not believe you have the type of business relationship with USA Today that is contemplated by the law. That said, USAToday.com did not disclose personal information to third parties for direct marketing purposes in 2009. On the print newspaper side, USA Today did disclose names and addresses of subscribers to a vendor, List Services Inc., which manages disclosures to third parties for direct marketing purposes. The attached document lists the names and addresses of the 37 entities to which such disclosures were made in 2009."
The most interesting names on that list include a couple of competitors: Dow Jones (publisher of The Wall Street Journal) and The New York Times.
Given USA Today's hundreds of thousands of subscribers, I'm surprised more marketers weren't interested in tapping its database.
In the old days, a large list of general interest newspaper subscribers was marketable. Today, unless the newspaper or its list manager is appending detailed demographics/psychographics, there is not as much value to direct marketers. Can't speak for USAT, but the Gannett and other papers I worked at would never invest in developing that kind of data.
ReplyDeleteWould be interesting to see how much revenue came from list rental. As for renting to competitors, that may be a reciprocal arrangement.