Comment by sanjayparekh
2 years ago
This is a great question. So when I came up with IP location back in 1999, there was nothing for location-based targeting. Any advertising that happened would be because a user shared a location (ZIP code, etc.) and then got cookie'd and that information was brokered between sites. This obviously doesn't work for more secure uses (content control, fraud detection, etc.), so some of these uses were made possible once we launched. The shift to streaming content would never have happened without a secure way to accurately know a user's location.
The other part of your question, I think, deserves its own blog post. One of my tenants was to NEVER be reliant on someone else's willingness to give us data or access. So, everything was designed with the idea that we would have to gather first-hand data and knowledge. If an ISP gave us data, that would be great and make things easier. But being beholden to ISPs would mean we would be hosed if the sands shifted. This is why I am still flabbergasted when people build their entire company based on someone else's platform, API, etc., and then are upset when those platforms change their models. If you build the foundation of your company on someone else's land, be prepared to lose the house.
I was doing legit music downloads and streams for the major labels in late 1999/early 2000 and I was using some sort of paid IP database to determine which of the 34 countries we covered the user was connecting from, so I could pay the right royalties.
Was the market really that small for IP geolocation 25 years ago? I don't remember it being a problem to source the data...
I think a lot of people are confusing access to some kind of IP location data with access to high(er) accuracy data. Yes, you could scrape whois data to create a IP location database but even country level would be in the mid-80s and then dramatically drop off from there. In the early dot-com boom, that was good enough since there was nothing really better.
Got you. I can't remember how accurate the database was. I think as long as you were "in" one of the 34 countries then the app worked fine, even if it had you pegged in the wrong place.