Last Friday, Yahoo Inc. announced it would allow consumers to opt out of having ads triggered off their personal information put in front of them. These ads were served up on a variety of branded Yahoo sites, such as Yahoo Sports or Yahoo Finance.
The company may as well have offered to have Yahoo users opt out of being attacked by woolly mammoths. Such an offer would have an equal amount of relevancy, if personal experience is any judge.
I’ve been a registered Yahoo user for nearly a decade. I regularly browse the company’s sports and finance sites, and my customized “My Yahoo” page pulls in information from sources that feed both professional and personal interests.
Yahoo should know a great deal about me based on what I’ve selected for this page. It knows where I live, at least on a zip code basis. It knows my interest in politics (I get feeds from some fairly wonky political and legislative sites). It knows the baseball teams I root for and my interest in travel destinations, based on the cities I monitor through its weather-tracking module.
Yahoo even knows my birthday. I don’t recall whether or not I volunteered my actual year of birth, but I do get a little happy birthday notice every year.
Yahoo is also aware of what I’ve elected not to receive: vapid celebrity news; games; automobile and real estate listings; and movie and television schedules. A culture vulture I ain’t.
Despite this cornucopia of information, I can count the number of relevant ads that have been served up to me on the noses of one face. But that one ad is more than offset by the irrelevant ads I am presented with on a daily basis.
The dirty little secret, I suspect, is that ad “customization” is based on Yahoo’s ad inventory. I shouldn’t be presented with spots for home mortgages (I rent) or automobile insurance (I don’t drive). I should be shown solicitations for subscriptions to political Web sites or publications. Yet I see the former, and not the latter.
The most likely reason for this is that Yahoo’s salespeople probably aren’t diving into their data. If they did, they’d obtain counts on the number of us with similar interests, such as two or more political modules on our My Yahoo pages. This would allow them to offer, for instance, Politics magazine a chance to put its links in front these consumers. And these same salespeople probably aren’t approaching Major League Baseball in hopes of getting banner ads presented to those of us who subscribe to news from our favorite clubs.
And Yahoo is almost certainly not selling banner ad space to local restaurants, although it does have a restaurant reviews module to which users can subscribe. Which is fine, but where are the ads from local restaurants that offer incentives for Yahoo users?
All this makes Yahoo’s offer of turning off relevant ads moot. As far as I can tell, the inventory to provide highly targeted ads simply isn’t there. If Yahoo has sold (I’m pulling numbers out of a hat here) 10 million mortgage refinancing application ads, but is unwilling to process smaller orders for more tightly targeted offers (such as Politics magazine or an interesting local bistro in my neighborhood), I’m going to get the mortgage refinancing ads, whether or not they’re relevant.
I flat-out challenge readers to write in with an example of an ad on a general Yahoo site – NOT a shopping recommendation engine suggestion a la Amazon.com – that truly demonstrates Yahoo knows who they are.
So thank you, Yahoo, for offering me the chance to shut off ad targeting based on my personal, or demonstrated, information. Just one question: When had you turned this feature on?
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact richard.levey@penton.com
