Advertising messages on BBC.com

If you are visiting the BBC website from outside the UK then you will be viewing the international version, BBC.com, which is delivered by BBC Worldwide Ltd, the BBC’s commercial subsidiary. This version of the website carries advertising, some of which may be displayed based on your behaviour on the site; a practice widely used across the internet and known as behavioural marketing. This service will only affect users outside the UK.

What is Behavioural Marketing?

Behavioural Marketing 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 marketing" 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 may then display advertisements on the international (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.

Aggregated Information

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. Our "onsite behavioural marketing" 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 websites.

Further Information

Further information about cookies and the technology solution itself is available on the Online Behavioural Advertising page in the BBC & Cookies section.

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 changing your Cookie Settings.

Please contact the Data Protection team at BBC Worldwide if you would like more information.