intelligent advertising
It seems like the big search engines have found yet another way to titillate your buying urges, and encourage your spending from their sites. Yahoo and google had always catered to your advertising needs, changing the advertisement content displayed based on the words you were searching. Yahoo had also catered to users ‘advertising needs’ by geographical location. But now, yahoo says that they will be using ‘behavioral targeting’ to rope in more consumer link-clicking on their site. That’s right. Psychology has invaded everything, even the search engine. Ha-ha. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. Yahoo won’t be probing your brain through waves sent by your hard drive, or sending subliminal messages. They are only going monitor and track the way that you use yahoo, the links you click, and how long of a time you spend at sites directed by them.
But is this invading your privacy? I realize that yahoo will only be using this information to send advertisements to you, but what could happen if someone with ill intentions accessed this info from yahoo, and used it to steal identity, or monitor/stalk others? Is it just me, or does this yahoo advertising method seem a lot like a virus?? ‘monitoring’ your activity through there site doesn’t seem like something desirable, in fact—it sounds scary. But whatev, as long as I don’t get ads for porn anymore right?
However, the more I thought about this topic, I realized, Yahoo is doing what magazines have been doing for years—but they haven’t needed to monitor their readers, because the magazine itself is geared toward a specific readership. This is also true for the internet, to a degree. Harking back to linked, the density of internet use is far more concentrated in developed, large cities, particularly in the U. S…so advertising can be geared towards a WIDE population, but not to the specificity of magazine ads. The internet would be the equivalent of someone receiving nature magazine, with an ad for hunting guns…it’s just not good enough.
But then there is spam—totally blind to any preferences, hobbies, or purchases. The equivalent of physical junk mail. Would you want spam that catered to your preferences? Personally, I would—this would mean that I might even open it before deleting it.
So anyway, I guess what it all boils down to is that the internet is becoming more intelligent and more aware of it’s users and their needs. I’m sure that advancements like this one will ultimately improve the internet, even if it is through trivial progressions like advertising. Today it will be advertising, tomorrow it will be automatic e-mail [intelligent] filtering, total voice command, etc. etc.
I’m guessing that these advancements will initially only benefit sellers on the internet…
Comments
Posted by: Britt
Posted on: December 5, 2005 07:59 PM
With magazines, you can rip out the pages if you don;t like it. I hope that yahoo wont be able to continuously bombard everyone with the unwanted ads.