Yahoo announced on Monday a new consumer tool called "Ad Interest Manager."
BoomTown is going to ignore the could-it-be-duller name for the feature, which--Yahoo said in a press release you can see below--gives users a "central place where Yahoo visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising served from the Yahoo Ad Network."
What fortuitous timing, since the first of three of the Federal Trade Commission's "Exploring Privacy: A Roundtable Series" begins Monday in Washington, D.C.
And, of course, the bigger backdrop is the pending regulatory approval of the massive search and advertising partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft. The two companies announced Friday that they had completed the definitive agreement for the deal.
(Credit:
FTC)
One of the key issues for regulators, of course, is the privacy implications of combining the search and online ad technologies of the No. 2 and No. 3 players.
The FTC's day-long agenda (PDF) is chock-full of academics and privacy group folks, but there is an Microsoft lawyer on a panel. (The next roundtable takes place at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law on January 28.)
Said the FTC on its site:
The Federal Trade Commission will host a series of day-long public roundtable discussions to explore the privacy challenges posed by the vast array of 21st century technology and business practices that collect and use consumer data. Such practices include social networking, cloud computing, online behavioral advertising, mobile marketing, and the collection and use of information by retailers, data brokers, third-party applications, and other diverse businesses. The goal of the roundtables is to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.
There will surely be lots to discuss, since privacy groups are wary of self-regulation by the very companies that link consumer data to advertising.
And, they have a point.
Visiting my Ad Interest Manager page is kind of freaky, to be honest. It shows I am interested in entertainment, technology and travel, checking in most on the finance and television pages. Correctomundo!
Also, it has detailed data about my computer, including its color depth, as well as my age and gender.
If I want, it is pretty easy to opt-out of the whole "interest-based" ad completely or by category, with on-off switches, which is a good thing.
If you want to know more, here is the Yahoo press release:
YAHOO! INTRODUCES AD INTEREST MANAGERPROVIDES CONSUMERS WITH GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND CONTROL OVER THEIR ONLINE ADVERTISING EXPERIENCE
Today Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) released a beta version of a new consumer tool called Ad Interest Manager, which takes transparency in online advertising to a new level for building user trust. Ad Interest Manager http://privacy.yahoo.com/aim is a central place where Yahoo! visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising served from the Yahoo! Ad Network.
"Ads tailored to users' interests make online experiences more compelling and user-focused, and the new tool Yahoo! is launching today will provide transparency into how Yahoo!'s interest-based advertising works," said Yahoo! Vice President of Policy and Head of Privacy, Anne Toth. "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." Anne Toth also pointed out: "Importantly, users who don't want interest-based ads can turn them off completely."
Yahoo!'s new 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.
"Yahoo! has long provided its users with products and services for free, thanks to a business model based almost entirely on advertising, and we've found that consumers are more likely to click on advertising that speaks directly to them and their interests," said Yahoo!Vice President and General Manager of Display Advertising, David Zinman. "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."
Yahoo!'s Ad Interest Manager is currently available in beta in the U.S. and will soon be made available to UK and European users. Planned future enhancements to the Ad Interest Manager will also let users add categories of interest that Yahoo! may have missed.
To see what the new Ad Interest Manager looks like and how it works, please visithttp://privacy.yahoo.com/aim.
Yahoo! was one of the first companies to implement a layered privacy center http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/details.htmlmodel more than eight years ago, which provides people with a central place to understand and control their privacy online, as well as their options when it comes to the use of personal data. This information is coupled with our industry-leading data-retention policy http://ycorpblog.com/2008/12/17/your-data-goes-incognito/, which anonymizes most Web log data within 90 days. The policy also strives to ensure that Yahoo! retains data only long enough to serve the business and create the highest-quality user experiences, while simultaneously maintaining the ability to fight fraud, secure systems, and meet legal obligations.
And here is the consumer privacy groups' press release on the FTC hearings:
Consumer and Privacy Groups at FTC Roundtable to Call for Decisive Agency ActionWashington, DC, December 6, 2009-On Monday December 7, 2009, consumer representatives and privacy experts speaking at the first of three Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Exploring Privacy Roundtable Series will call on the agency to adopt new policies to protect consumer privacy in today's digitized world. Consumer and privacy groups, as well as academics and policymakers, have increasingly looked to the FTC to ensure that Americans have control over how their information is collected and used.
The groups have asked the Commission to issue a comprehensive set of Fair Information Principles for the digital era, and to abandon its previous notice and choice model, which is not effective for consumer privacy protection.
Specifically, at the Roundtable on Monday, consumer panelists and privacy experts will call on the FTC to stop relying on industry privacy self-regulation, because of its long history of failure. Last September, a number of consumer groups provided Congressional leaders and the FTC a detailed blueprint of pro-active measures designed to protect privacy, available at: http://www.democraticmedia.org/release/privacy-release-20090901.
These measures include giving individuals the right to see, have a copy of, and delete any information about them; ensuring that the use of consumer data for any credit, employment, insurance, or governmental purpose or for redlining is prohibited; and ensuring that websites should only initially collect and use data from consumers for a 24-hour period, with the exception of information categorized as sensitive, which should not be collected at all. The groups have also requested that the FTC establish a Do Not Track registry.
Quotes from Monday's panelists:
Marc Rotenberg, EPIC: "There is an urgent need for the Federal Trade Commission to address the growing threat to consumer privacy. The Commission must hold accountable those companies that collect and use personal information. Self-regulation has clearly failed."
Jeff Chester, Center for Digital Democracy: "Consumers increasingly confront a sophisticated and pervasive data collection apparatus that can profile, track and target them online. The Obama FTC must quickly act to protect the privacy of Americans,including information related to their finances, health, and ethnicity."
Susan Grant, Consumer Federation of America: "It's time to recognize privacy as a fundamental human right and create a public policy framework that requires that right to be respected. Rather than stifling innovation, this will spur innovative ways to make the marketplace work better for consumers and businesses."
Pam Dixon, World Privacy Forum: "Self-regulation of commercial data brokers has been utterly ineffective to protect consumers. It's not just bad actors who sell personal information ranging from mental health information, medical status, income, religious and ethnic status, and the like. The sale of personal information is a routine business model for many in corporate America, and neither consumers nor policymakers are aware of the amount of trafficking in personal information. It's time to tame the wild west with laws that incorporate the principles of the Fair Credit Reporting Act to ensure transparency, accountability, and consumer control."
Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.
Additional stories from AllThingsD
The death of Michael Jackson in June launched a frenzy of Web activity and propelled the late pop star to the top of the search charts for 2009.
That's the word from Google, Yahoo, and Bing, all of which have revealed their popular search terms for the past year.
It's not too shocking to see Jackson leading the searches for the year. Following the pop star's death in June, Akamai found that worldwide Web traffic had surged 11 percent over normal levels. Even Google--which in the initial going thought the Jackson-related traffic was an attack of some sort--was briefly sent staggering.
Searches for Michael Jackson songs spiked in late June when news broke about the pop star's death.
(Credit: Google)According to Google's Zeitgeist findings, "Michael Jackson" was the "fastest rising" worldwide search term of 2009. In the U.S., "Michael Jackson" placed second behind "Twitter." Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, in a blog post also pointed to an up-and-coming music sensation:
As millions of fans said goodbye to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson led the list of our top 10 fastest rising queries across the globe. And a new star was born, too--quirky pop singer Lady Gaga became a search sensation the world over. In addition to appearing on many regional fastest-rising search term lists, from the Czech Republic to Switzerland and Kenya to the United Kingdom, Lady Gaga also landed in the #9 spot on the global fastest rising list.
On the social side, Google monitored whose Twitter accounts were the most searched for. According to the company, Miley Cyrus' Twitter account was the most sought after, followed by those of Lance Armstrong and Taylor Swift. Khloe Kardashian's marriage to basketball player Lamar Odom was the most-Googled wedding of the year.
"Michael Jackson" was the top Yahoo search term for the year. He was followed by a who's who (and a what's what) of the U.S. entertainment scene. "Twilight" was the second most-popular search term, followed by wrestling organization "WWE," starlet "Megan Fox," singer "Britney Spears," and manga series "Naruto." Filling out the top 10 were "American Idol," "Kim Kardashian," "Nascar," and "Runescape."
Microsoft's Bing, which debuted in late May, had similar results. Once again, "Michael Jackson" was the top "trending topic," followed by "Twitter" and "swine flu." "Stock market" and "Farrah Fawcett" rounded out Bing's top five.
Of course, 2009 was also marked by continued concern over the state of the economy. According to Yahoo, "coupons," "unemployment," and "stimulus plan" were the most-numerous queries related to the economy. By contrast, Google's most-searched economy-related terms were "crisis," "cash for clunkers," and "Iceland."
Google also followed queries related to celebrity deaths in 2009. Users searched for "Michael Jackson" the most, followed by "Billy Mays" and "Steve McNair." Yahoo's data revealed that Michael Jackson's death was the most-searched term, but unlike Google's data, the pop star was followed by "Farrah Fawcett" and "Patrick Swayze."
See also:
• Google Zeitgeist 2009
• Yahoo Year in Review 2009
• Top Bing searches in 2009
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
SAN FRANCISCO--He wasn't on the program, but nobody was disappointed that Google co-founder Sergey Brin showed up at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon and agreed to sit down for an onstage chat with conference organizer John Battelle.
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder
(Credit: Google)Battelle said Brin had been extended an invitation to speak but turned it down, to which Brin joked, "I didn't say no, I just never responded."
But it was an appropriate time to hear from one of the minds behind Google because one of the most evident trends at the conference is that the search market is heating back up. On Wednesday alone, Microsoft announced a partnership with Twitter and Facebook for real-time search results, Google announced a similar deal with Twitter, and Google executive Marissa Mayer previewed a new "social search" feature in Google Labs.
Brin talked about the new competition with a "bring it on" attitude. "I think what Bing has reminded us is that search is a very competitive market," he said. "There are many interesting companies out there." He said he's disappointed that Yahoo is retreating from the fight and planning to strike a deal with Microsoft instead.
"I think Yahoo had a number of innovations there, and I wish they would continue to innovate in search," Brin said. He didn't go into specifics.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz had been slated to speak at the conference on Wednesday but canceled at the last minute, citing a bad case of the flu.
Yahoo's deal with GroupM should produce more content designed specifically for advertisers, such as celebrity mom blog Spotlight to Nightlight, hosted by Ali Landry (right), shown interviewing Mayim Bialik.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Yahoo's bid to expand the amount of original content it produces is about to get some help from an advertising agency.
CNBC reported Wednesday that Yahoo has signed an agreement with WPP's GroupM digital entertainment studio to co-produce original content that will likely highlight WPP's advertising clients in a significant way. Yahoo confirmed the deal has been signed, and it hopes to have the new shows ready to go by the end of this year or the beginning of 2010.
One of Yahoo's main priorities this year is building out its Media group, which is slated to receive the windfalls generated by Yahoo's ongoing plan to exit businesses it no longer considers to be at its core. The group already does a ton of traffic, but executives want to increase the amount of originally produced content on the site in hopes of luring advertisers with deep pockets.
One way to make that happen is to get the advertiser on board even before the content is created. Like any online media company, Yahoo tracks the activity of its readers and viewers to get a sense of what people are reading and watching, and can pitch advertisers with ideas for shows that target the people they want to reach. An early implementation of this strategy resulted in the development of a blog about celebrity moms called "Spotlight to Nightlight" hosted by Ali Landry and sponsored by State Farm, after Yahoo noticed a surge in searches for content related to celebrity parents.
Concepts that are being considered by GroupM and Yahoo include "Rock 'n Roll Jet Plane," a reality show billed as a "real-life 'Almost Famous,'" and "50 Jobs," a show patterned after The Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs" that follows unemployed job seekers. The shows could also include the types of scripted longer-form show that Yahoo is developing, if there's a match between concept and advertiser.
Whether or not any of this content will actually be watchable is another matter, of course. But the strategy is low-risk for Yahoo, in that the company can only develop programs that already have a sponsor and outsource much of the production work to GroupM.
There comes a time in the life of every yodel when it's time to try something different.
As you might have heard or seen if you've opened a computer, switched on a television, or walked down a city street over the last week, Yahoo has a new ad campaign.
As part of the $100 million effort, Yahoo sought out musicians to record the famous Yahoo yodel in just about every corporate-sanctioned niche musical category, and it released the results of the effort on Monday.
Like your yodel to sound like Coldplay? We recommend Modern Rock 2. Looking for more of a Slayer vibe? Metal 2 has you covered. And hip-hop fans can't go wrong with Old Skool 1 and the soon-to-be immortal line: "Some PC I prefer the Mac/But if you Yahoo then I got your back." Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between intentional and unintentional comedy.
If you can't find the yodel of your dreams among the 58 choices that Yahoo provided, you can also upload your own in the Yodel Studio. Results posted thus far are, um, mixed.
The original yodel dates back to 1996, when singer Wylie Gustafson was paid $590 to sing it in a television commercial. Hopefully, Yahoo did its due diligence this time around: Gustafson later sued the company for continuing to use the yodel--easily Yahoo's best-known trademark--for years without his permission. The parties later settled.
Updated September 18 at 10:40 a.m. PDT with Yahoo comment.
Having conquered the Web's text-based ad market, Google is setting its sights on graphical display ads--a market dominated by rival Yahoo.
The search giant on Thursday took the wraps off a revamped DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a public exchange that allows publishers to offer excess ad inventory they can't sell to advertisers looking for a bargain. Google said the exchange will meld DoubleClick's ad exchange with Google's own technology.
"Better technology can help make display advertising work better for all involved," Neal Mohan, Google's vice president of product management, said in a statement. "We're focused on growing the display advertising pie for everyone. The DoubleClick Ad Exchange is a major part of that goal."
The revamped exchange will incorporate Google's AdWords and AdSense programs, as well as feature real-time bidding and a new API (application programming interface) designed for ad networks.
Yahoo, which runs the largest online ad exchange through RightMedia, an exchange it purchased in 2007 for $680 million, said it expected the display market to have other exchanges.
"We welcome these exchanges, and look forward to working with them and integrating with them for our partners," Yahoo Marketplace chief Frank Weishaupt said in a statement. "The industry will be well served if all exchanges embrace the values we cherish, and will help promote rather than restrict the spirit of openness and the resulting transparency and liquidity of supply, demand and data in the industry."
Google's dominance of the search engine advertising market has been fueled by text ads. In 2008, it completed its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in hopes of expanding its presence in display ads. Display ads--banners or image-based advertisements--haven't produced the same return that search text ads have to this point but are still an important part of most Web sites.
Internet display advertising accounted for $7.6 billion in 2008, roughly a third of the $23.4 billion in revenue generated by all Internet ads for the year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Microsoft's new Bing search service is the fastest-growing U.S. search engine among the top 10, according to a Nielsen report released Monday.
The total amount of searches on Bing rang in at 1.1 billion for the month of August, a leap of 22.1 percent over July, winning Microsoft a 10.7 percent share of the search engine market.
Google remained in the top spot with a commanding 64.6 percent share, accounting for 7 billion searches in August, a gain of 2.6 percent over July. Yahoo saw its search results drop 4.2 percent for the month to 1.7 billion, earning it 16 percent of the market.
(Credit:
Nielsen)
Other players in the top 10 included AOL Search in fourth place with 333 million searches and Ask.com Search in fifth with 186 million searches.
Similar studies have also seen a boost in Microsoft's search business. An August report from ComScore discovered that Microsoft's share of the global search engine market lept 41 percent from July 2008 to July 2009. Bing was introduced in May, taking the place of Microsoft's Live Search.
Earlier this week, Microsoft showed off a "visual search" feature for Bing that returns thumbnail images for at least some search results. Microsoft reportedly will be debuting a Bing 2.0 sometime soon sporting a variety of new features.
A three-judge panel ruled Friday that Yahoo will not have to pay up every time it plays a song on its Internet radio service, affirming an earlier verdict.
In what is being seen as a defeat for the music industry, Yahoo Music was not deemed "interactive" enough to require the company to negotiate with record companies for the rights to play songs over the Internet. Instead, according to Reuters, it merely has to pay licensing fees to digital music rights organization SoundExchange.
The suit arose way back in 2001, when a division of Sony sued Launch Media claiming the service was bypassing a law that requires those who provide specific playlists of songs over the Internet to pay rights holders. Yahoo also acquired Launch Media that year, but has since turned over control of the service to CBS Radio, a division of the same corporation that publishes CNET News.
Yahoo won the case in 2007, but Sony appealed, resulting in Friday's decision.
With Bing, Microsoft is trying to reinvigorate its role in the search business. It has also inadvertently brought renewed attention to the problem of illicit pharmacies operating on the Internet.
The attention on Bing came earlier this month with the results of a study that examined Internet pharmacy ads (PDF) on Microsoft's revamped search engine. The study, conducted by LegitScript, an online pharmacy verification service, and KnujOn, an Internet compliance company, found that 90 percent of the reviewed Internet pharmacy advertisements were from fake or illegal Internet pharmacies. It also found that most of the Internet pharmacies reached through sponsored ads on Bing did not require a valid prescription.
Sponsored ads are links, paid for by companies hawking products and services, that turn up at the top of search results pages alongside noncommercial links.
A study by LegitScript and KnujOn takes Microsoft to task for sponsored search ads on its Bing site that lead to sketchy Internet pharmacies. (Click image to enlarge.)
(Credit: LegitScript)"We were able to purchase potentially addictive drugs without a prescription or any age verification via Bing.com ads," LegitScript President John Horton told CNET News. "We also received counterfeit medication. Microsoft profits from these illegal ads, which put Internet users at risk."
But the problem isn't confined to Bing. For all the buzz generated by Bing--which debuted in June, replacing Microsoft's Live Search--it's still only the third most-used search tool, dwarfed by first-place Google and also well behind Yahoo. And those search engines themselves are no strangers to ads for illicit pharmacies.
The problem has also been around since consumers began flocking to the Internet more than a decade ago. In 2003, for instance, Yahoo's Overture unit bowed to pressure from pharmacy groups and stopped selling search-related advertising to unlicensed online pharmacies. That also spelled an end to the troublesome ads on Microsoft's MSN portal, at that time a significant partner of Overture.
Over the last decade, the situation has evolved to bring new challenges.
"In the early years of the Internet, it was a case of entrepreneurs not understanding the legal requirements for the dispensing of drugs. Later, it was the push by senior citizens and public officials to obtain drugs that were cheaper than medications available in the U.S.," said Carmen Catizone, executive director of the trade group National Association of Boards of Pharmacies.
"At the present time," said Catizone, who vouched for the research by LegitScript, "the Internet has become a haven for drug seekers and abusers, particularly (regarding) controlled substances. It is a much more serious and dangerous phase of the Internet."
Rogue online pharmacies sell a wide range of medications, from the sleep aid Ambien to the muscle relaxant Soma and the erectile dysfunction treatments Viagra and Cialis. The NABP lists only 18 certified and recommended online drugstores at its Web site, while more than 3,800 are non-compliant and not recommended
The response from Redmond
Microsoft disputes LegitScript's claim that 90 percent of the sponsored Internet pharmacy ads on Bing are fake or illegal, adding that it is working to weed out the rogue advertisers that do slip through. The company uses an Internet pharmacy verification service called PharmacyChecker--a competitor of LegitScript--to ensure that its sponsored prescription drug advertisements are legitimate.
Investors panned Yahoo's search and advertising deal with Microsoft on Wednesday, sending Yahoo's stock down 12 percent. IDC's analysts called it a "strategic mistake."
But here's what's good about it: After a year and a half of public scrapping, behind-the-scenes drama, and dysfunctional communications through leaks to the press, Microsoft and Yahoo now can get back to business.
The Microhoo concept has been reduced from a giant cloud of uncertainty hanging over both companies to merely a complicated partnership between two rivals with Google as a common foe. The range of possibilities for Microsoft and Yahoo, which ran all the way from nothing to Yahoo disappearing altogether, has been pruned back to a much more manageable scope.
Nobody will notice any difference immediately from the outside. First comes regulatory scrutiny, with the companies hoping for approval in early 2010. But already, the deal provides a framework that should make it easier for the companies to establish their new identities.
With Microsoft acquiring license to Yahoo's search technology, applying its search-ad auction process to both companies' searches, and offering jobs to many Yahoo employees, it appears Redmond is carrying more of the Ph.D.-intensive fight to Google. Yahoo, keeping its display advertising business and focusing on its home page redesign, becomes more of a hub for people's online activity and platform for outside Web sites' developers.
Some awkwardness remains where those two visions overlap. One is the work Yahoo has done to augment search results through a program called SearchMonkey, which can interpret tags on others' Web sites so they can be spruced up with new information when those pages appear in search results. To work, it requires the cooperation of the Web crawlers that index the contents of Web pages and the servers that present the search results.
To me, that looks like the sort of chore that will require Microsoft and Yahoo to work together in search. Fortunately, Microsoft and Yahoo have a 100-page playbook that had better address such aspects, and Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi declared Wednesday he likes the SearchMonkey approach.
The companies also gave themselves two full years to fully implement the deal, too, so there's time to work out such details. In the meantime, Yahoo can't afford to stand still. SearchMonkey is one element of a new hybrid search page that Yahoo said it will start testing with its users starting in August.
There's some important context for these changes and for the Microsoft-Yahoo deal: search results are growing beyond the plain list of 10 hyperlinks with accompanying snippets of text. Google, for example, blends in ever larger quantities of "universal" search results such as maps, YouTube videos, photos, and news.
Yahoo plans to make its search pages more like its main page.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Yahoo's new search results page include not only SearchMonkey, but also display advertising and the key element of its new home page, a customizable list of applications down the left side. The search results themselves become just part of a broader package, so Yahoo outsourcing the actual search engine duties to Microsoft isn't giving away as much of the core business.
Outsourcing search has a cost, of course. The partnership means Yahoo will get only 88 percent of search-ad revenue on its sites for the first five years, down from 100 percent today. Yahoo, though, also gets lower operational expenses and thus, it expects, greater profitability over the long term. Yahoo expects $275 million more each year in operating cash flow.
Carol Bartz, Yahoo's new chief executive, has shown herself to be a pragmatist who prefers picking her battles. With the Microsoft deal, she's chosen to sit a big one out, freeing the company from having to out-Google Google. What the company sacrifices in ambition it gets back in goals that are actually attainable.
For Microsoft, though, the struggle against Google becomes more intense. The combined search market share of Yahoo and Microsoft still is half what Google has, and the fact that Wednesday's Yahoo pact is smaller in scope than some earlier possible incarnations means Microsoft has that much more hard work before it.
The company clearly wants to make a third big business out of its online operations to complement its Windows and Office cash cows. Getting Yahoo's search technology and Web site traffic gives it a better stronghold but by no means a victory.
