Facebook Advertising: Will Microsoft Extend Targeting to Third Party Sites?

Mashable hypothesizes that Microsoft may use some combination of browser cookies and profile data to target advertising on third party sites:

For example, if you’ve listed in your profile that one of your favorite bands is Coldplay, you might see an ad for their CD or concert tickets when browsing a random web site like ESPN.

Since people don’t seem particularly interested in clicking on ads within FB, this idea might hold more water than the Facebook’s current targeted advertising model.

Mashable contends that the targeted ads would have a higher click-through rate than Google’s context-sensitive advertising, thereby drawing content publishers away from AdSense. But I’m not so sure that’s the case if the targeting doesn’t get any better — after all, I’m still getting ads for weight loss products because I’m female.

I’m not sure I’d be any more likely to click on an ad featuring a tanorexic Hillary Duff clone if it were served to me while surfing Feministing than I would if it were served to me while I was playing around getting work done on Facebook. In fact, the juxtaposition would be downright incongruous, and I’m betting that publishers like Feministing’s Jessica Valenti wouldn’t be too keen on hosting such ads either.

The other obvious downside of this is — of course — that dropping cookies on people’s computers that feed their personal data to third-party websites raises all kinds of privacy concerns. Something innocuous like a taste for complaint rock might not be too sensitive, but something like sexual orientation might be more worrisome. Data privacy would have to become a top priority.

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