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June 23, 2005

Yahoo Testing Behavior-Based Contextual Ads

In the run-up to releasing its own contextual text ad system to compete with Google's AdSense, Yahoo has begun testing text ads targeted towards user behavior.

The user behavior data is being supplied by Revenue Science, whose marketing vice president had the following to say:

"There's a ton of sites on the Web like entertainment, blogging and social networking sites—all those sites are better served by focusing on the user, not what's on the page."

The methods being used to determing behavioral targeting are kept secret, but you can see the ads being tested on Catster.com and Dogster.com (right side of the page on both sites).

Apparently, Revenue Science feels cat people are interested in getting accepted to a good college, while dog people care more about frequent flyer miles. Google AdSense, meanwhile (lower left of page) thinks they're interested in scratching posts and kennels, respectively. I wonder who's closer to the mark.

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