Targeted Advertising

Targeted Advertising Update (For outside the UK only)

In April 2009, BBC Worldwide Limited (the BBC's commercial subsidiary which publishes advertising on www.bbc.co.uk when the site is accessed outside the UK) implemented a new service that allows us to deliver a certain amount of advertising as targeted advertising, a practice widely used across the internet and known as behavioural targeting. This service will only affect www.bbc.co.uk users outside the UK.

Behavioural targeting technology gives users and advertisers a more valuable and unique experience by delivering advertising and content that is more relevant to the user.

The system we are using is a type of "onsite behavioural targeting" which uses "cookies" to discover general information about which pages on our sites you visit. It also looks at IP addresses to add general information about the country, city or region in which you are located, along with your domain name (e.g. what internet service provider you use). This information enables you to be grouped with other people of similar interests and places you in a "market segment". We then display advertisements on the ex-UK version of the site which we believe people in your market segment will find relevant. We believe this makes the advertising more interesting and useful to you, and also helps us increase the value we get out of the site and from our advertisers, and therefore ultimately gives us a greater ability to invest in great content for the benefit of all our users.

It is important to note that at no time will we or our service providers attempt to identify you individually, and at no time do we know who you are or what pages you individually have been looking at - we simply aggregate the relevant information to create the market segments of groups of people. We will at all times seek to comply with the regulatory framework applicable to onsite behavioural targeting technology in our implementation of it on BBC.com.

This "onsite behavioural targeting" functionality is different from other forms of behavioural targeting in that we only look at your journey across BBC.com and we do not use or share data with or from other people's sites.

Further information about cookies, the technology solution itself and the company that runs the technology for us, AudienceScience, is available in our Privacy and Cookies Policy below. If at any time you do not want your site visit looked at by us in this way, you can turn the behavioural targeting technology off and "opt out" by following the instructions in our Cookies List.

Return to the Privacy and Cookies Policy

Last Updated : 1st April 2009