Xavier Media®

As our other blog adv.erti.se wrote yesterday Google will start with interest based ads, which means that everything (almost everything) users do on the Internet will help Google to create a profile of their interests. This profile will then be used to display relevant ads interesting the visitors to your sites.

As an example someone surfing a lot on sports related sites using for example Adsense or Analytics will be classified as interested in sports and will also therefore see sports ads. Another example is someone watching a lot of music videos at Youtube will see ads for concerts, CDs, and other music related stuff.

This email was sent out to everyone using Adsense:

We're writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site's privacy policies. You'll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to display ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast").  To develop interest categories, we will recognise the types of web pages that users visit throughout the Google content network.  As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category.  To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Centre at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310&hl=en_GB.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557&hl=en_GB to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date and make any necessary changes by 8 April 2009.  Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

As you can see you need to update your privacy policy before the 8th of April to reflect these changes.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.