By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

They had a good reason to exclude British readers, though. The New York Times used targeted advertising technology, tweaked of course, to prevent British readers from reading information that technically would be prejudicial in the trial of the airline terror suspects in that country.

“On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain,” is the message they would have seen. “This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.”

Richard J. Meislin, the paper’s associate managing editor for Internet publishing, said the technological hurdle was surmounted by using some of The Times’s Web advertising technology. The paper could already discern the Internet address of users connecting to the site to deliver targeted marketing, and could therefore deliver targeted editorial content as well. That took several hours of programming. Source: The New York Times

We Say: Huh, advertising tech being used for something other than just putting banner ads into my browser. Cool!