Yahoo has just launched its Ad Interest Manager designed to make online advertising more transparent. The opt-in service gathers information based on searching habits to provide relevant advertisements to the user. The Ad Interest Manager site lets the user see a summary of their online activity on Yahoo’s content network. They can then determine their […]
Yahoo has just launched its Ad Interest Manager designed to make online advertising more transparent. The opt-in service gathers information based on searching habits to provide relevant advertisements to the user. The Ad Interest Manager site lets the user see a summary of their online activity on Yahoo’s content network. They can then determine their level of exposure to interest-based ad served by the Yahoo Ad Network.
08/12/2009
The move follows rival Google’s recently launched Ads Preferences program.
Anne Toth, Yahoo VP for Policy and Head of Privacy, said that Ad Interest Manager will provide Yahoo users/visitors transparency into how Yahoo’s interest-based advertising works as he emphasized that users can opt-out of Yahoo’s interest-based ad targeting.
“Yahoo! is committed to providing consumers with increased transparency and control when they are online. Ad Interest Manager will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up-to-date information.”
Specifically, Yahoo’s Ad Interest Manager Tool :
· Provides a central point where Yahoo! visitors can assert even greater control over their online experience.
· Gives visitors an unparalleled view into the information used to deliver interest-based advertising.
· Shows the visitor both Yahoo!’s educated guesses about their interests and a summary of observations, along with other information they have provided.
· Provides a list of specific interest categories that Yahoo! has placed a user into and lets people turn those categories off.
· Allows people who don’t want to see interest-based ads to turn them off entirely.
David Zinman, vice president and general manager of display advertising, said, “With the introduction of Ad Interest Manager, users can not only get a better understanding of how the process works, but they can also communicate better with Yahoo! and our advertisers about what most interests them.”
Ad Interest Manager, which is launched initially for the U.S. users, will soon be made available to UK and European users.
Yahoo! also noted that the users will be able to add categories of interests that it may have missed via planned future enhancements to the Ad Interest Manager.
http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/
