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Julio Alonso, director general WeblogsSL (James Breiner photo) BURGOS, Spain -- In 2004, management consultant Julio Alonso got the itch to write about gadgets and technology. He started a blog and a year later that evolved into the website Xataka . Since then he and his partners have built WeblogsSL , a community of 36 websites in Spanish with more than 13 million unique visitors a month. The sites focus on autos, lifestyle, business, leisure, and technology. They have survived the global financial crisis, which hit particularly hard in Spain. And they have expanded their websites to Mexico and recently Colombia . (Versi�n del blog en espa�ol) However, Alonso, 45, struggles with what to do about the latest tsunami of change. The audience has flooded to mobile devices and advertisers are going with them. He has more than a decade of experience in the business of digital media, and an international perspective, having studied in Holland and worked in Brazil and Italy, among other place...

According to eMarketer , half the digital ad spending this year will be on mobile , a total of $29 billion. Advertisers want to know if their messages are reaching the right target groups of people at the right time so that ad dollars are not wasted . Some people are better targets than others for messages about, say, infant car seats, or trips to Mexico, or eye makeup, or Hummers. It is not a simple matter to measure Internet traffic, whether on the web or on mobile apps. But metrics matter to advertisers, who use them to determine the amount they are willing to pay for having their messages in a digital publication. (Versi�n de este post en espa�ol) Advertisers want to know not only the size of the audience, but its characteristics -- income, location, interests, spending habits, hobbies , and more. But for technical reasons, it is difficult to track a single user across all the devices they may use at home, at work or on the go -- smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop. Cookies,...

A deal with the devil. Versi�n en espa�ol It was the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke who wrote , "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And clearly many people think that way about applications for smartphones. Mobile apps can show us detailed maps of most places on earth. They can read QR codes that tell us when the next bus is coming to this stop. They alert us to the scores of sporting events we care about. They allow us to send text messages, free, to billions of people anywhere in the world ( WhatsApp and WeChat users alone account for nearly 2 billion). So we willingly give ourselves over to these services that do all these amazing things for us. Often we sign in to them using our Facebook or Google or Twitter accounts, thereby giving those social network platforms access to information about our preferences for products, who are friends are, where we are dining, and how we are amusing ourselves. Read more �