Privacy Digest

Google Achieves Behavioral Targeting Nirvana: "In an March 2007 article in Business 2.0 titled The Quest For The Perfect Online Ad, the author points out that Yahoo is one of the leading companies in the behavioral targeting space. A candid interview with Yahoo's Dr. Usama Fayyad the company's Executive Vice President of Research & Strategic Data Solutions shows Fayyad thinks showing ads based on behavioral targeting is much more powerful than simply showing ads based on simple search queries.

A salient quote from Fayyad in fact is 'I know more about your intent than any 1,000 keywords you could type.

Yahoo has 12 terabytes of user data flowing through it everyday and to put this in perspective, this amount represents more data than the entire Library of Congress! Fayyad proudly says he can predict with 75% certainty which of the 300,000 monthly visitors to Yahoo! Autos will purchase a new car within the next three months.

In addition Fayyad points out there are times when advertising works best out of context. In other words once the computer knows what your intentions are... Let's say trading stocks -- it can display a highly effective ad for a trading company while you are tracking your fantasy football team.

But Yahoo is not the only company with massive amounts of users and data... Google too is in the position of tracking their customer's behavior in Gmail, search, Froogle and a cornucopia of other sites which have chosen to run Google Adsense ads.

In addition Google has an extremely popular search toolbar installed on millions of computers allowing the company to keep track of what users do on a variety of sites.

Last week however the game of behavioral targeting got even more competitive as Google announced they are purchasing DoubleClick (News - Alert).

DoubleClick is the leading company in the business of displaying advertising online. Large web publishers often use DoubleClick as a way to track advertising on their own sites. For example DoubleClick could be set to allow an advertisement - let's say a banner ad at the top of TMCnet to be displayed every 5th time the page is displayed. In addition the ad could be shown only on nights and/or weekends or to European visitors.

DoubleClick like many websites uses cookies which are files placed on user's computers to track their browsing history.

With the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users. It would be fair to say that greater than 85% of Internet users frequently come into contact with ads served by DoubleClick. In addition there are a vast number of sites serving up Google's ads and running Google Analytics. Google perhaps now has access to the behavioral information of over 90% of web users.

One can expect Google to start mining DoubleClick's databases immediately and in the process, cross reference this data with its own vast databases of search history and perhaps even Gmail content.

The point is, Google now has access to not only it's own army of sites but it also owns much of the browsing history of sites like Yahoo and MSN. In other words the competitive advantage Yahoo was recently touting could fade away rather quickly if Google not only knows what Yahoo! knows but much, much more."

(Read Original Article - Via TMC.)