Sekac

Big name search engine leaders such as Yahoo and Google have begun to leverage something new in their campaigns to advertise to consumers that many in the digital world are not yet sure about supporting. The web giants are now starting to tailor their ads by tracking the history of users and then serving up ads that consumers are more inclined to appreciate. This is an approach that they plan to hone so that a advertisers will have a greater level of penetration into the life cycle of their ads to be able to see which will work best with individual consumers. This is known now as behavioral advertising and is not always smiled upon both by government officials and special consumer interest groups who are concerned with web surfing privacy, but it could prove to be lucrative for the search engines in question. Since the big search providers are offering their services for free, they have had to find ways to monetize the services without directly interfering with the browsing experience of the consumers in question.

Web based consumer groups have touted that the ads may actually be less hassle for ad weary web surfers because they are actually targeting what the consumers are interested in rather than trying to guess. However, there are many different factors coming in to play and groups will likely continue to do battle over what is and is not appropriate advertising online since the web is still relatively young in comparison to other popular forms of media today such as cable TV, magazines or newspapers.