Web giant analyzes more than 200 million inboxes for clues about what products people might buy—a practice much of Silicon Valley has declared off-limits
The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo AABA +0.24% still sees the practice as a potential gold mine.
Yahoo’s owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications Inc., VZ +0.20% has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath’s presentations as well as current and former employees of the company.
Oath said the practice extends to AOL Mail, which it also owns. Together, they constitute the only major U.S. email provider that scans user inboxes for marketing purposes.
.. Yahoo’s practice began more than a decade ago and expanded over the years, said a person familiar with the matter. The company has increasingly looked for new ways to wring revenue out of its aging portfolio of web properties, which have stagnated in the era of smartphones and social networking.
.. When Verizon created Oath last year, it envisioned the new unit as a future advertising rival to Google and Facebook Inc. for its potential to marry data on Verizon’s vast pool of wireless subscribers with Yahoo’s highly trafficked online hubs, Verizon executives have said.
Oath owns dozens of popular websites, such as HuffPost and Yahoo Finance. It helps advertisers show messages on these sites as well as across the web, using a variety of ad-placement services.
.. Email scanning has become one of the company’s most effective methods for improving ad targeting, said Doug Sharp.. Mr. Sharp said that being served ads is part of the trade-off users make in exchange for free online services, and that Yahoo’s research shows they prefer ads that are relevant to them... Oath promises to give advertisers an edge by identifying groups of users who have bought certain products or services based on the receipts, travel itineraries and promotions in their inboxes.. Google said it stopped targeting ads based on Gmail data last year, saying it wanted users to “remain confident that Google will keep privacy and security paramount.”.. Google already collects so much data from its search engine that it no longer needed to rely on email data.. Oath’s email scanning appears to go a step further than Google’s former system, by creating interest profiles of users based on the data in their email and using that intelligence to target them elsewhere on the web... Yahoo Mail users who receive frequent emails about driving for Lyft Inc. are sometimes placed into a “self-employed” audience, Mr. Sharp said. Some people who bought several plane tickets in the past year are labeled frequent travelers.. Oath uses receipts in Yahoo Mail inboxes as proof that an ad campaign convinced a user to buy a product.. Oath’s new privacy policy prevents users from filing class-action suits and instead requires them to pursue their grievances through arbitration or small-claims court... In 2015, Amazon stopped including full itemized receipts in the emails it sends customers, partly because the company didn’t want Yahoo and others gathering that data for their own use