… and he wants to sell you stuff.

A post at Wired today notes that many web-users are creeped out by targeted advertising. People just do not like the idea of their personal information being shared to target advertising:

The trick to winning over younger consumers? Transparency. After four privacy policies were shown to respondents, a majority claimed that they were more comfortable with the sharing of their data for advertising purposes.

I remember during the dark days of the early web — long ago, in the age of HotBot – the first time it hit me that ads were being targeted based on my browsing: I was shopping for clothes online and kept getting hit with ads for weight-loss products. I’m reminded of Dennis Miller’s rant about Levi’s printing the sizes on the outside of their jeans: “It was great when I was a 34, but when the ol’ odometer kicks over to the big four-oh, it’s time to get an unlisted number.” There are no unlisted numbers online.

But Harris Interactive suggests that targeted advertising isn’t going away, even though they bug a lot of folks:

  • A six in ten majority (59%) are not comfortable when websites like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (MSN) use information about a person’s online activity to tailor advertisements or content based on a person’s hobbies or interests. A quarter (25%) is not at all comfortable and 34 percent are not very comfortable;
  • The remaining 41 percent who say that are comfortable with websites tailoring content is split between 7 percent who are very comfortable and 34 percent who are somewhat comfortable.

The real challenge for news operations is going to be an endurance test: They’re making money from online advertising, and the amount of money they’re making is growing–but not growing fast enough to make up for the money they’re losing as print advertising contracts.