Web Analysis: Yahoo Knows What You Did Last Summer
ADOTAS — Faceless online companies may know you better than your best friend does.
They use the data to send consumers targeted ads – and then charge a pretty penny for the ads due to superior response rates, The New York Times reports.
A New York Times/comScore analysis revealed that large web companies are gathering all kinds of personal goodies from users – Yahoo (with 158.6 million unique users) seems to be the most eager collector, gathering an average of 2,520 nuggets per user, per month, the New York Times reports. The comparably reticent Google (with 157.7 million unique users) collects about 578 juicy tidbits.
Ad executives told the Times that the analysis is the first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data reviewed by Web companies.
“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group, told the Times. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”
And many large online companies have acquired smaller companies largely for their treasure troves of consumer data. “So many of the deals are really about data,” David Verklin, chief executive of Carat Americas, told the Times.
Microsoft Corp. would inherit an almost infinite amount of data if its takeover of Yahoo succeeds: roughly 110 billion data collection points per month on Yahoo’s own sites, the report reveals.
Reader Comments.
Ok, this smells a little funny.
First of all, I’ve been a user of Yahoo for well over 10 years, I’m a good demo to target and I still see useless ads. For instance, ads for “Florida home vacations” when I’ve not been to Florida in 20 years nor ever even remotely indicated an interest.
Or how about all the T-Mobile ads before and after I closed my T-Mobile account after 6 years of being with them?
Yeah, they probably know lots about me, but they sure aren’t able to sell it to advertisers. And at the end of the day, profiling is only for commercial value — my “hopes, worries and fears” sure don’t hold any commercial value, even if they could extract emotional sentiment from a bunch of web pages.
And there’s no way in hell Google has fewer touch points with most Web users — what with AdSense, search, YouTube, their toolbar, Google Analytics, etc.
This almost sounds like a clever ploy by Google to get the court of public opinion against the Yahoo/MSFT attempt.
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