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MySpace Treads Carefully With "HyperTargeting"

Posted by kdawson on from the opt-out-in-whatever dept.

Ian Lamont writes "MySpace is preparing to boost its advertising systems, by launching a targeted ad platform called HyperTargeting and creating a Web-based system that lets vendors purchase ads without dealing with human sales teams. HyperTargeting will 'look at a person's interests listed on their public profile and then classify the user into particular interest-specific categories.' MySpace claims that early tests resulted in a 300 percent increase in the number of ad click-throughs. The company apparently learned a lot from Facebook's earlier experiences with Beacon — MySpace members will be able to opt out of HyperTargeting, according to the company."

2 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Not all that bad, really by HadouKen24 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If done properly, this really isn't a bad thing for users. It only uses information put on your public profile. You really shouldn't have anything incriminating or overly personal on there anyway. I mean, if you're willing to share it with strangers (I assume that's what "public" means), why would it be a problem for an ad company to see it? That's not to say that there aren't nefarious uses to which this kind of thing could be put. But just from what I read in the article, there doesn't seem to be too much of a problem.

  2. Myspace advertisers are mostly bottom-feeders by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Myspace has very low ad rates for contextual ads, and very low quality advertisers. The typical Google AdSense ad is something like "Free MySpace Backgrounds, Profile Layouts, Smileys all in one place. Download them all for Free!"

    Their banner ads tend to be from major consumer brands, and are probably more valuable than the contextual ads.

    Increased click-through rate is not necessarily a win. Remember, there's that 10-15% of Internet users who produce 50% of the click-throughs, but don't buy much. (That's probably Myspace's demographic.) The advertiser problem today is to make those users go away, instead of paying Google money for their clicks.

    As the metrics get better, it's becoming clearer that what's good for the advertiser is quite different from what's good for the online ad delivery service. The advertiser wants a sale; the ad service wants a click. This is starting to be a problem for Google as advertisers realize that the "Google content network" often has negative value and opt out.