Google recently started testing the waters with “interest” based advertising in hopes to provide more interesting ads and of course higher CTR (click through rates). Basically, if you like MySpace themes, you can add it to your interests and adds will show up. While I don’t think many people will use this because they see ads as obtrusive or have become “Adsense blind” and it wouldn’t matter to them, I do see the purpose of it. I think this blows away any company that uses “Interest” and “User demo” based advertising as their business model such as these guys.
Privacy issues? Google answers some questions and provides transparency on the Google Blog post.
This kind of tailored advertising does raise questions about user choice and privacy — questions the whole online ad industry has a responsibility to answer. Many companies already provide interest-based advertising and they address these issues in different ways. For our part, we’re launching interest-based advertising with three important features that demonstrate our commitment to transparency and user choice.
- Transparency – We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google’s ad serving.
- Choice – We have built a tool called Ads Preferences Manager, which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories associated with your browser so that you can receive ads that are more interesting to you.
- Control – You can always opt out of the advertising cookie for the AdSense partner network here. To make sure that your opt-out decision is respected (and isn’t deleted if you clear the cookies from your browser), we have designed a plug-in for your browser that maintains your opt-out choice.
Check out the video for more info
