For marketers, targeted ads were the next logical step in the online advertising space, and this was made clear by the rapid rise they have seen over the last few years. However, for many everyday Web users, the idea that advertisers were tracking them based on their personal information wasn’t quite as popular.

There are a number of issues inherent in attempting to target display ads to a specific set of customers, and none is more pertinent than the fact that one simply cannot know how accurate the information that a user submits actually is, and thus, whether the ads are actually reaching the desired audience.

Largely because of this, Microsoft has removed the ability to target ads based on age and gender in adCenter, which provides the pay-per-click ads seen on the Microsoft Network, most prominently on the Bing search engine.

According to a company employee in a Microsoft Advertising Help thread, “Some people add the information accurately, most don’t and even more don’t add the information at all. So if you use age and gender, your [sic] limiting yourself to what information was provided by the searchers when signing up for Windows Live.”