I was invited to test the beta of Claria's Personalweb, which is another take on personalizing the web experience -- both content and ads -- through monitoring personal interests. I had read the New York Times article about the new product this morning by Bob Tedeschi with great interest.
Claria is the former adware pariah Gator, which has somehow managed to shake off the negatives of its initial foray into the web, and is now trying to sell off that generation of software assets, as well. When the company's IPO failed, last year, management decided to invest heavily in technology now debuting as Personalweb:
[from Every Click You Make, They'll Be Watching You - New York Times] by Bob TedeschiIf a man, for example, downloaded the software and surfed through stories about the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament and car reviews, his PersonalWeb home page would reflect those interests the next time he clicked to it. In addition to showing newer headlines about cars and college basketball, the page might also feature ads from car companies or for jerseys from the man's favorite team.
Claria says that because those ads are so closely aligned to the user's interests and recent behavior, marketers will be willing to pay more than they might on other sites for the ability to reach PersonalWeb users.
That part of Claria's plan is convincing enough for some analysts, and privacy advocates appear satisfied that Claria will stand by its pledge to track only the computer (whose owner it does not identify), not the personal information of the user. Whether many consumers will use the service anyway — and give marketers an audience worth pursuing — is the big question.
[...]
PersonalWeb's technology gathers information about all the users on the service, then ranks the pages they read according to how many other people visit those pages and how long they stay, among other things; people can suspend the tracking. Then, when someone surfs or searches for a specific category of information, Claria will identify relevant pages that the user didn't find, and post them on a PersonalWeb home page.
People can seed their home pages by choosing from a list of topics much the same way they might choose from suggestions when they customize their Yahoo home page, for instance. PersonalWeb includes about 600 such topics, from taxidermy to coin collecting.
Those who are not interested in customizing their page can simply wait until the service knows enough about them to serve up similar suggestions. How long they will have to wait is partly a function of how many other users with similar interests join in, since Claria must track people with similar interests before it can make good suggestions.
Well, I gave it a try. But of course, since it is Windows and IE only (hiss), I had to run it in VirtualPC. At first glance, it looks like yet-another-personal-page, a la MyYahoo. And it seems to function reasonably well in that mode.
I tweaked some setting, such as selecting a Web 2.0 widget and other various tech sources. I clicked through on a few.
At that point, I expected that the system would start pushing tech ads in the skyscraper in the right hand column, but no. I guess it has a much higher threshold for personalization than that, which is weird. I didn't want to spend the day fooling around in the (abysmally slow) Virtual PC world, so I boosted.
But I am open to the premise: I would like to have ads tailored to my actual interests rather than random junk. Like nearly everyone else looking at the technology, I am concerned about the privacy issues, but I also believe it is possible to anonymize that info and still push personalized ads.
In fact, I believe that this sort of technology will someday blur the distinction between ad and content to the point where it may be hard to tell one from the other. If I am an extreme travel nut researching a trip to Hawaii, being pushed a video from a blog that highlights extreme kayaking is *NOT* an ad, even if there is an embedded opportunity to reserve a space in a kayaking class there.
But we have a long way to go to get there, and I am not certain that the personalized page approach is at all the right angle. I believe that a browser plugin -- a firefox sidebar, for example -- would be much better. Or an instant messaging buddylist style RSS reader, that tracks what I click through on, who I am reading, and so on.
There's a lot of room to innovate in personalized advertising, and Claria is barely touching the surface.
Comments