Customized Advertising on MySpace
by Juli Mosoff
Open up any webpage online and the first thing you notice are the large advertisements on the top of the site. What happens when you click on those ads? Well, it takes you to another site, of course, but advancements in technology are also making it possible to track which advertisements you click. Then advertisers can make an educated guess at which ads you might be interested in the next time. One click and you're customizing Web sites without even knowing it. If we stop to think about the fact that we live in an age in which technology rules the world and information travels incredibly fast, it isn't surprising to realize that we have much less privacy than we think we do.
This is especially true among teenagers and young adults who are part of social networking websites, particularly the popular Web site, MySpace, because young people are often oblivious or apathetic to the amount (or lack thereof) of privacy they have on the internet. When logging onto MySpace, the vibrant, flashing advertisements jump out at you. These advertisements are all produced to appeal to most users and the ads range from online dating services to sports paraphernalia to popular clothing brands. With somewhere between one hundred million and two hundred million active users, it's likely that these ads are viewed and clicked on many times a day. It seems completely ordinary, considering that almost all Web sites include ads and banners, but many users don't know how MySpace is utilizing new technology that will make marketing specific products much easier and more effective. Plus, MySpace is completely customizable: Users choose the color and pattern of the page; they determine what song will play when others visit their page; there are sections for members to describe themselves, their favorite books, music, and movies. Advertising companies are reading these profiles and determining exactly how to use their personal information to market products to them.
Advertisers who have teamed up with MySpace have begun thinking about an alternative to the traditional, mass-marketed approach to advertising. Instead, they've begun thinking about something new, something that would increase their profits exponentially. They now want to use customized advertisements that cater to each person's likes and dislikes based on personal information on MySpace profiles, changing Myspace's revenue from $40 million per month to $70 million.
Known to the Fox Interactive employees who are working out the technology as "internet-based targeting," this new method of marketing will go on without the users even knowing that they are being watched. A 100-employee team will search for certain keywords in a member's profile and will assign them to one of hundreds of specific categories that expresses what advertisements they think the member will be most likely to click on. The team will also closely look at the member's friends and what groups they belong to, and they can also tell which advertisements the member has clicked on previously. The result of this "hyper targeting" will be customized ads that researchers say are 80% more likely to be clicked on than the traditional mass-marketed ads used now.
Although Fox Interactive is overjoyed about the eventual increase in profits, many groups, such as the Privacy Forum, say that this is a complete violation of privacy. They claim that the whole process is corrupt because members of MySpace are "not aware they are being monitored." They then go on to say that "current ad-targeting is only the first step in what has become a huge arms race to collect revealing data on Internet users." Fox Interactive combats this thought by saying that Google, using their sophisticated advertising program AdSense, does exactly the same thing. According to the New York Times, "In a fraction of a second, [AdSense] can evaluate millions of variables about its users and advertisers, correlate them with its potential database of billions of ads and deliver the message to which each user is most likely to respond." The fact that these ads are more relevant to users on Google brings in more revenue for both Google as well as the advertisers. Those opposed to the idea of customizable advertising for teenagers say that just because Google did it first, it is not necessarily a 'right' thing to do.
This type of advertising forum such as AdSense or similar ones that other large search engines such as Yahoo! use could possibly soon be the standard method of advertising used on the internet, and it is interesting to see that a non-search engine Web site such as MySpace is already developing the technology to collect this information about its users. Unfortunately, the Privacy Forum as well as many other discussion-based groups trying to oppose this type of advertising do not have substantial ground to raise questions about data collection because the Web Sites often rewrite their privacy policies to specify the amount of data they collect. This, however, doesn't make the act of collecting information any better since most Web Site users don't closely read the privacy policy and still do not know that they are being tracked and marketed to online. Altogether, the internet is becoming less and less private, and most people aren't even aware of it.
