PayPal is planning an ad business using data on its millions of shoppers

livemint.com:

PayPal hopes to boost its growth by starting an ad network juiced with something it already owns: data on its millions of users. The digital payments company plans to build an ad sales business around the reams of data it generates from tracking the purchases as well as the broader spending behaviors of millions of consumers who use its services, which include the more socially-enabled Venmo app. PayPal has hired Mark Grether, who formerly led Uber’s advertising business, to lead the effort as senior vice president and general manager of its newly-created PayPal Ads division.

In his new role, he will be responsible for developing new ad formats, overseeing sales and hiring staff to fill out the division, he said. PayPal in January introduced Advanced Offers, its first ad product, which uses AI and the company’s data to help merchants target PayPal users with discounts and other personalized promotions. Advanced Offers only charges advertisers when consumers make a purchase.

Online marketplaces eBay and Zazzle have begun testing it, according to a PayPal spokesman. But PayPal now aims to sell ads not only to its own customers, but to so-called non-endemic advertisers, or those that don’t sell products or services through PayPal. Those companies might use PayPal data to target consumers with ads that could be displayed elsewhere, for instance, on other websites or connected TV sets.

PayPal processed 6.5 billion payments by approximately 400 million customers in the first quarter, according to its most recent earnings report. “If you’re someone who’s buying products on the web, we know who is buying the products where, and we can leverage the data," Grether said. Consumers who use the PayPal credit card would also provide