• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 3, 2006

Yahoo Japan and ad-serving company Claria have entered into a joint venture that involves distributing Claria software, which tracks consumers as they surf the Web, to Yahoo Japan users.

Claria, long known as an adware company, is in the process of shedding its controversial pop-up serving business and, instead, working with publishers to serve consumers in-page ads based on consumers' interests.

Yahoo Japan, owned partly by Softbank Corp., is expected to offer users in Japan a downloadable program such as instant messaging, or a toolbar, that will be bundled with Claria's personalization platform. Claria is expected to then use the software to offer users personalized content, as well as to target ads based on users' Web-surfing habits.

"The overall intent," said Chief Marketing Officer Scott Eagle, "is to offer consumers a more personalized online experience."

Eagle added that the details haven't been fully worked out, and that the deal probably won't go live until the end of this year or early next year.

In the United States, Claria has long distributed Yahoo paid search links in pop-unders. That relationship is independent of Yahoo Japan deal's with Claria, said a Yahoo spokeswoman.

Claria's adware model involved bundling its ad-serving software with other programs, such as file-sharing service Kazaa, and then serving users pop-up ads on a host of different sites. Online publishers often objected to this tactic, because Claria's pop-ups competed with publishers' in-page ads; consumer advocates also voiced concerns that consumers downloaded the ad-serving programs fully realizing that they would then be served pop-up ads.

Claria's new model, expected to be in place by the end of the second quarter, still will require users to download a software program--but rather than serve pop-ups, Claria will work with publishers to serve behaviorally targeted in-page ads.

Eagle said the new model should prove more publisher-centric than its former strategies. "Even the publications that didn't like us--they never said, 'Your platform is dumb.' What they all said is--you're not using it to our benefit. You're using it to compete with us. You're using it to send pop-ups to our consumers, which we don't think is a good experience."

Claria also is expected to announce today it's received $40 million in financing with investments from Softbank America, Rogers Communications, Asia Pacific Ventures, and Sand Hill Capital.

Additionally, a beta version of one of Claria's personalization products, PersonalWeb, will go live today. PersonalWeb customizes publishers' home pages for users based on their interests, as determined by Web-surfing behavior. Claria will work with publishers to create versions of this program; the ads served through PersonalWeb will only appear while users are on the pages or sites owned by those publishers.