InPrivate Filtering and Advertising

Internet Explorer (IE) 8 gives users the ability to block content if there’s a reasonable chance that it could be used to track a user’s activity without her knowledge or consent. This enhances privacy for individual users and their organizations, but it also reduces the effectiveness of many organizations’ Web advertising campaigns.

Many Web pages today include content from multiple parties, delivered from different domains. For example, the text on a news story may come from a server with the same domain name as the URL, while an embedded video file may come from a third party at a different domain.

Blending first-party and third-party content is particularly common with online advertising. Many pages on large Web sites, such as MSN and Yahoo, don’t get enough traffic to justify a direct advertising sales effort, and many smaller Web sites don’t have an advertising sales force at all. Thus, publishers often sell advertisements—including both graphical and text-based advertisements—through networks or aggregators, including Microsoft (Drive PM), AOL (Platform A), Google (Google Advertising Network), agency conglomerate WPP (24/7 Real Media), and Yahoo (Yahoo Network), as well as many independent networks, such as Tribal Fusion and ValueClick. All of these aggregators have a reach of more than 70% of Internet users in the United States, with leader AOL’s networks reaching more than 90%, according to June 2009 figures from Comscore.