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Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts, a significant margin given the site's average nightly hotel booking is around $100, chief scientist Wai Gen Yee said. Mac users are 40% more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel than PC users, Mr. Yee said, and when Mac and PC users book the same hotel, Mac users tend to stay in more expensive rooms. "We had the intuition, and we were able to confirm it based on the data," Orbitz Chief Technology Officer Roger Liew said. The sort of targeting undertaken by Orbitz is likely to become more commonplace as online retailers scramble to identify new ways in which people's browsing data can be used to boost online sales. Orbitz lost $37 million in 2011 and its stock has fallen by more than 74% since its 2007 IPO.

AOL will, of course, be out selling these units to run across its own mobile sites and apps, which amassed 28 million unique visitors in March, according to ComScore. But part of the approach, as with the desktop display ads, will involve selling the Pictela technology to other publishers based on an ad-serving fee model. Mr. Rogers wouldn't reveal exact pricing, but said "we're priced very aggressively to scale." He said fees will be lower than what custom, rich-media competitors charge, but higher than fees for ad-serving that don't contain rich media.