NebuAd

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NebuAd, Inc
Type	Privately held Company
Founded	2006
Headquarters	California, USA
Key people	Robert Dykes, Chairman, founder and Chief Executive Officer
Industry	Online advertising
Website	www.NebuAd.com

NebuAd is based in Redwood City, California, with offices in New York and London and is funded by the investment companies Sierra Ventures and Menlo Ventures^[1]. It is one of several companies developing Behavioral Targeting advertising systems, seeking deals with ISPs to enable them to analyse customer's websurfing habits in order to provide them with more relevant, micro-targeted advertising. Others include Phorm and Front Porch.^[2]. Adzilla and Project Rialto appear to be developing similar systems.^[2]

NebuAd has signed up more than 30 customers, mostly Internet access providers^[3], its agreements with providers covering 10 percent of the broadband users in America.^[4]

[edit] Overview of the service

The System works by installing a hardware device inside the ISP's network. Each device can monitor up to 50,000 users.^[5] Users can opt-out, however the opt-out uses a cookie stored on the users computer, which will be lost if the user regularly deletes cookies from their computer.^[6].

In 2007 it was reported that Redmoon, a Texas based ISP was using NebuAd's technology to inject Redmoon's own advertising into pages visited by its users.^[7].

America's twelfth largest cable operator, WOW! (formally Wide Open West) started rolling out Nebuad in February 2008, the roll out was completed in the first week of March 2008. WOW updated its terms and conditions to include a mention of Nebuad.^[8], and in some cases informed customers that the terms had been updated.^[9]. At least two customer's noticed that when they used Google, non-google cookies for sites such as nebuad.adjuggler.com were being read and written, but when they contacted WOW's support department, they initially denied that the ISP was responsible for this activity.^[9] One spent hours trying to disinfect his machine as he wrongly believed that it had been infected with spyware after noticing problems with Google loading slowly and the creation of these non-google cookies, eventually resorted to reinstalling his machine from scratch, only to discover the problem had not gone away.^[9]

ISPs trialing or deploying, or preparing to deploy Nebuad include WOW^[9],Charter, Embarq^[10], Broadstripe ^[11], CenturyTel^[3] and Metro Provider^[12].

According to Nebuad's sales pitch less than 1% of users opt-out. One ISP expects to earn at least $2.50 per month for each user^[13]

Plans to implement Nebuad have not gone down well some ISP's employees, one even plans to re-route his traffic to avoid nebuad's spybox.^[13]

Nebuad buy impressions from ad networks including Valueclick^[14].

Nebuad uses data such as Web search terms, page views, page and ad clicks, time spent on specific sites, zip code, browser info and connection speed to categorise its user's interests.^[15] Bob Dykes, NebuAd CEO claims "We have 800 [consumer interest segments] today and we're expanding that to multiple thousands".^[16]

Members of US Congress, Ed Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, and Joe Barton, a ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, have argued that such services must be opt-in only to comply with the provisions laid down by Section 631 of the US Communications Act, and have written to Charter requesting they suspend the test "We respectfully request that you do not move forward on Charter Communications' proposed venture with NebuAd until we have an opportunity to discuss with you issues raised by this proposed venture".^[17]

It has been questioned whether Charter users can really opt-out of being monitored, or if they will only be able to opt-out of receiving targeted ads.^[18] It has also been questioned if it would breach anti-wiretapping laws.^[18]

Some argue^{[citation needed]} that NebuAd is worse than rivals such as Phorm because they haven't in their ties with US ISPs informed customers of their presence nor have they offered a clear method of opting-out of having their personal data analysed^{[citation needed]}.

Privacy campaigners have argued against any system that sits within an ISP^{[citation needed]}, and claimed that in Europe such systems are illegal under the Directive on privacy and electronic communications (Directive 2002/58/EC)

NebuAd argues that behavioural targeting enriches the internet on several fronts. Firstly, website owners are offered an improved click-through rate (CTR), which could increase profits or reduce the amount of page-space dedicated to advertising. Owners of previously thought ad-unfriendly websites are offered a chance to make money not on the subject matter of their website but on the interests of their visitors.

Advertisers are offered better targeted adverts, hence reducing the "scattergun approach" (publish as many ads as possible in the hope of catching a client) and users are offered more relevant adverts: just because you visit the financial pages of a newspaper doesn't mean all you're interested in is financial product and books on investing!

ISPs get paid for allowing NebuAd access to their network on a per-user per-active profile basis.

NebuAd argue that their technology will bring-down the cost of internet access, but campaigners argue that NebuAd should be more up front about who they watch and the ISPs with which they are partnered.