Internet portal Yahoo! and Washington State-based behavioral targeters Revenue Science are testing a program to show Web page text listings based on user behavior, but questions have arisen as to whether the sites running the tests include at least one that deals in adult images.
Three so-called pilot sites – dogster.com, catster.com, and tinypic.com – are said to be running the Yahoo/Revenue Science tests. According to Internet marketing and advertising news site AdRants, tinypic.com provides the curlicue to adult, albeit a small one.
"[W]hile many of the pictures on the site are garden variety, a sizable handful fall into the porn category," AdRants said June 24. "We're talking soft here. Nothing horrific. Just basic nudity." The site cited a tipster who wondered whether Yahoo! and Revenue Science might be tracking or retaining about porn surfers for future targeting at other sites.
Neither Yahoo! nor Revenue Science returned calls for comment, but Revenue Science said elsewhere that prior site behavior usually gets better results than page content.
Media Week said the revelation of this testing program came just weeks before Yahoo! was expected to release an AdSense-like contextual advertising network. "Yahoo! currently operates a small network, showing text ads on a handful of non-Yahoo! sites like ESPN.com and Edmunds.com, in addition to the Yahoo! portal," Media Week said. "The Yahoo! content network works similarly to AdSense, scanning a Web page for its context and then matching that to advertising."
Some Web publishers now use Revenue Science software to show ads based on previous user behavior, the publication added, including Websites for The Wall Street Journal and the Reuters news wire.
