Online Customized Ads Move a Step Closer
Yahoo SmartAds is an attempt at behavioral targeting of ads, directing ads to the people who are most likely to buy your product or service.
We’re doing real-time creative assembly that leverages what we know about our audience. You can buy the entire Wall Street Journal site, and when a female shows up, we will create a different ad or when someone from New York shows up, another one.
- Todd Teresi, VP of display marketplaces at Yahoo. Yahoo!'s New ''SmartAds'' Meld Brand and Direct Response Advertising
This service is just for Yahoo's own pages, they're not extending the ads out to bloggers which would have been ideal as bloggers reach niche audiences.
Yahoo should be working with bloggers, they have the Yahoo RSS Reader, Delicious and Flickr. I'd like to see a page reminiscent of the early Yahoo where bloggers could be listed by categories and SmartAds could be delivered with links incoming and outgoing.