Nebu Ad - Overview of The Service

Overview of The Service

NebuAd's solution has three main parts: Hardware hosted within the ISP that is capable of inserting content into pages, an off-site server complex to analyze and categorize the contents of users' Internet communications, and relationships with advertising networks willing to present NebuAd's targeted advertising.

The System works by installing a hardware device inside an ISP network. Each device can monitor up to 50,000 users. Users can "opt-out" of NebuAd’s information collection and targeted ads, but there is no way for users to prevent ISPs from sending the data to NebuAd in the first place.

Because ISPs route all of their customers' traffic, it is a perfect vantage point from which to monitor all the traffic to and from a consumer using Deep packet inspection (DPI). By analyzing this traffic, NebuAd says it gains more information about customers' particular interests than less intrusive methods can provide. NebuAd's privacy policy says that they will "specifically not store or use any information relating to confidential medical information, racial or ethnic origins, religious beliefs, or sexuality which are tied to personally identifiable information ('sensitive personal information')." It also advises, "The information we collect is stored and processed on NebuAd's servers in the United States. As a result, that information may be subject to access requests by governments, courts or law enforcement."

At least two customers of a Middle America ISP known as WOW! noticed that when they used Google, unexpected cookies for sites such as nebuad.adjuggler.com were being read and written, but when they contacted WOW's support department, WOW initially denied that it was responsible for this activity. One customer 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.

On July 9, 2008 WOW! suspended the use of Nebuad services to its subscribers.

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

Nebuad buy impressions from ad networks including Valueclick.

NebuAd argues that behavioral 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 one visits the financial pages of a newspaper does not mean all they are interested in is financial product and books on investing.

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

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. Nebuad does not have access to user identification information from the ISP, but may be able to discover this through traffic monitoring (for example, email traffic may tie an email address to an ip address). Bob Dykes, NebuAd CEO claims "We have 800 today and we're expanding that to multiple thousands".