Advertising on Children’s Web Sites 19
Web sites that featured privacy polices were less likely to host ads which
collected personal information directly on their initial pages. Only 11 percent of ads
(N=66) whose host Web sites had privacy policy did this, in contrast to 24% of ads
(N=20) whose host sites had no privacy policy (
2
(1, N=697)=10.55, df=1, p<.01).
For those ads whose host sites had privacy links, forty-four percent of these ads
(N=256) targeted children as their primary audience, another 44 percent (N=255) targeted
general public, and 13 percent (N=73) targeted grownups (see Table 4). For those ads
whose host sites did not feature privacy policies, only 12 percent of them (N=10) set
children as their target audience while majority of these ads (70%, N=58) directed at the
general public, and eighteen percent of them (N=15) targeted adults (
2
(2, N=667)=30.77,
df=2, p<.001).
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Table 4 About Here
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Ads nested in Web sites having privacy policies were more likely to display ads
promoting their own Web sites. More than half of the ads (52%, N=302) that belonged to
Web sites with privacy policies promoted their host Web sites, while only 33% of the ads
(N=27) whose host sites did not have privacy links promoted their own sites (
2
(1,
N=667)=10.70, df=1, p=.001).
Sixty-five percent of ads (N=376) whose host sites featured privacy policies had
additional ads on the page that the ad opened up to. Forty-nine percent of ads (N=41)
whose host sites did not have privacy policies had additional ads (
2
(1, N=666)=7.03,
df=1, p<.01).
Convention