• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 11, 2005

Ad-serving company Claria plans today to announce a new service that will allow publishers to customize pages for individual consumers based on the other Web sites they have visited.

The program, dubbed "PersonalWeb," is based on principles similar to Claria's recently launched behavioral targeting feature, BehaviorLink, which looks at Web-surfing history to classify the 40 million consumers who have downloaded Claria's adware software into marketing buckets.

Publishers that adopt the personalization program can theoretically serve every participating visitor a different home page. "If you have a huge Yankees fan, you might want to give that person Yankee headlines," said Scott Eagle, Claria's chief marketing officer.

Another example Eagle gave is of a consumer who is investigating a vacation in Hawaii. When that person visits a news Web site, the publisher might serve him news stories about Hawaii on the landing page.

Eagle said the feature will launch either by the end of this year or early next year. Claria currently is in discussions with publishers who might participate, he added. The program requires customers who have already downloaded Claria's ad-serving software to specifically opt in for personalization.

The feature raises the question of how much control news publishers are willing to cede about the articles that are displayed on the landing page. A spokeswoman for the New York Times Co. indicated that extensive personalization could have disadvantages. "One benefit of the current format is that readers like to see the editorial judgment of our editors and reporters," said the spokeswoman.

Eagle said he anticipates that some publishers who participate would only want to allow a small sliver of the home page to be customized. For instance, a news site might set aside 20 percent of its home page for personalized content, so that the vast majority of the page would be uniform for all visitors.

Eagle said PersonalWeb will complement the new behavioral targeting feature because, Claria believes, users who personalize Web sites spend more time on those sites--which translates to more ad impressions. A study by Claria's market research and Web analytics division, Feedback Research, found that 14 percent of Claria's adware subscribers have personalized portals and ISPs such as America Online, MSN, and Yahoo! That group spends 90 percent more time at those sites and views 130 percent more pages, according to Claria.