True.com ads are particularly
prevalent on MySpace

After six months of testing, MySpace announced it can now tailor ads to the personal information that users liberally slather upon their profile pages. The claim goes that its "tailoring technology" improves the likelihood of ad clicks by 80 percent on average.

The New York Times reports that Fox Interactive executives will spark discuss the results of its six-month beta program this week.

President Peter Levinsohn of Fox Interactive calls the company "blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life’s passions of our users." He adds that "We have an opportunity to provide advertisers with a completely new paradigm."

At ad:tech Miami in June, Myspace's CMO alluded to the company eventually wielding users' psychographic data.

Facebook is currently also experimenting with ad customization.

Fox Interactive's "monetization technology group," comprised of 100 employees, designed an algorithm to scour MySpace pages for user interests. MySpace members were then assigned to one of 10 categories based on primary likes.

The algorithm also takes into account users' heroes, groups joined, identities of friends, and previous ad responsiveness.

To fully proof the system, "relevance testers" manually scour the profiles and categories every two weeks.

Fox Interactive claims that in closed testing among a select series of unnamed advertisers, clicks on tailored ads more than doubled, with music ads in particular enjoying a 70 percent jump.