Interest-Based Advertising: Increasing Income or Privacy Paranoia?
Earlier this month Google announced a beta rollout of some changes in Adsense. From April 2009, some Adsense-enabled websites will be taking part in a new interest-based Adsense allowing ads to be more targetted to the user/ browser. As the year progresses, if the beta is successful, interest-based advertising will be applied to more websites. As yet there’s no list of which websites are being included in the beta. I know a friend who has a high-traffic site, with several thousand page views a day, has been emailed by Google asking him to update his privacy policy, so perhaps Google is only including high-traffic/ high-earning sites in the beta.
The way interest-based advertising work will work is that if a browser visits sports websites for example, then when a shopping site is visited, any Adsense on the site might be geared towards sales of sports clothes and shoes. If users are seeing ads more closely aligned with their interests then they might be more tempted to click on the ads so both Google and the site owner get more advertising income. The internet user also gets to see more of the things he likes.
The downside of interest-based advertising is a small loss of privacy. To make interest-based advertising work, Google needs to track the sites you visit and store this information in cookies on your PC. All browsers provide options to delete cookies and browsing history. When this happens, the interest-based advertising will be back to square one until a sufficient browsing history can be built up again. Most users however, simply don’t delete cookies so Google will have a good opportunity to build up a record of a lot of people’s browsing history. For those of us who want to delete the trail of where we’ve been with our browsers but still take advantage of interest-based advertising, we can install a special plug-in that prevents the Google cookie from being deleted as well as letting you control the kinds of data Google tracks.
Some people will no doubt be paranoid about Google collecting data. The reality is that this kind of data has probably been available to Google for a long time. More and more people now have a iGoogle login or have the Google toolbar installed giving Google the opportunity to log browsing data every time a site is visited. This latest interest-based advertising simply shifts the game from an opt-in scenario to an opt-out scenario, i.e. you’re going to get tracked unless you decide to turn the feature off using Google’s preferences manager plug-in.
As an opt-out scheme, interest-based advertising might sound a bit scary but the reality is that the non-internet world has been running an opt-out trend tracking scheme since credit cards were introduced. Every time you shop at Sainsbury’s or order stuff online, the seller and credit card company get access to a ton of data covering what you purchased and where you purchased all nicely tied up with your name and home address. Google are unlikely to gain access to anything like such a rich pool of data and will only be able to tie up browsing trends with browsers and not specific people. Hopefully, with interest-based advertising Adsense users can look forward to better ads and increased income.
For tips on making the most of Adsense, see Adsense Optimisation.