Advertising and Privacy

AOL’s websites, products, and services are supported in large part by advertising. This is how we are able to provide content and services. AOL owns an advertising network, AOL Advertising, that spans AOL owned and operated pages as well as many other websites across the Internet.

AOL displays a variety of advertisements including banner ads, rich media ads, and sponsored links, and these ads may appear on the sites you visit for a variety of reasons. In the same way that we use various information about you (see “AOL Information”) to customize or personalize the content or services we provide, we may also use information to make the ads you see more relevant for you, and more effective for advertisers. We may also use information other than AOL information from non-AOL publisher sites to assist in determining the effectiveness of advertising. This helps advertisers spend their money wisely and helps the providers of content (publishers) increase revenues and stay online.

Often, an ad you see online is customized based on the content of the site.  For example, in such contextual ads, you may see sports-related ads on a sports site. We may also select an ad based on our knowledge of the audience we think may be looking at that page. This is often done with publicly available and/or aggregated demographic information, or it may be done with analysis of the aggregated traffic on a particular website, or by using the registration data or other household data you have provided or that we have acquired from other companies (your “AOL Information” as defined in the Privacy Policy).

AOL may share certain information about you as a user (such as age, zip code, or other household information AOL has collected or received) with certain ad networks and service providers, including AOL Advertising, to help deliver more relevant content and advertisements throughout their networks. AOL takes steps to ensure that the information provided to ad networks is not personally identifiable, but instead provides attributes which are linked to a non-personally identifiable ad network cookie.

AOL Advertising also provides ads to you on AOL Services and across the AOL Advertising networks, in some cases based on your activity on those sites. This is often called behavioral advertising, behavioral targeting, interest-based advertising, or customized ads. When you visit sites on the AOL Advertising network, you may receive a “cookie” or other technology that helps us note, in an anonymized way, that you visited that site. This information goes into ad logs that are kept for a limited duration.  From the ad logs, AOL Advertising may use information about your activity on the AOL Advertising network to help us display ads that are more relevant. Note that the information shared with advertising networks is always with a unique identifier, but not personally identifiable information such as your name, email address, etc.  

The following third party advertisers and service providers may use cookies, web beacons, or other technologies in connection with advertising, content, and services offered through AOL Services and other sites, including helping to operate ad networks. The use of cookies, web beacons, or other technologies by AOL Advertising and other content and ad network providers is subject to the privacy policies of those third parties. Click on the links below to learn more about their practices and the choices they provide to you.

• ADTECH
• AOL Advertising
• DoubleClick
• NLG News Registry
• Omniture
• Scorecard Research