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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."

4 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. They haven't learned by solweil · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It sounds like they haven't learned from Facebook. I thought the whole problem is that Facebook had an opt-out rather than opt-in system. This supposed improvement is also an opt-out system.

    1. Re:They haven't learned by lbgator · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't know if this was a serious comment or not, but I have recently taken this tactic. Griping on /. is important so that your views get spread around amongst your peers, but after you have an informed decision - start griping to your elected officials.

      Don't like net neutrality? Don't like IP/Copyright law? Don't like the fact that stevia can't be sold as a food additive? Write your govenor/senator/congressman/whomever and let them know. The reason we get these BS systems in place is because the a**hats are in the ears of our representatives. It takes five minutes to write an email - it doesn't have to be eloquent or anything. Just a quick "hey I'm a regular dude and I think that such and such is no good". If the /. crowd in general would take that tactic we could start fighting about xhtml 5 or something.

  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.

  3. Firefox + AdBlock by firefly4f4 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Web pages have ads? That's news to me.