White extremists congregating in Yahoo clubs and chat rooms will now be greeted with banner ads urging them to "fight hate and promote tolerance."

The Internet portal and Tolerance.org, a new website created by the Southern Poverty Law Center, launched the campaign Wednesday. "It's a novel approach to reaching people," said Jim Carrier, the director of Tolerance.org. "Now we can get our message to them on their own turf." Yahoo is donating $3 million worth of ad space to Tolerance.org over the next three years. The ads will also pop up when the portal's search engine is used to look for 75 keywords such as nazi, hate or diversity. Parenting and education websites are another focus of the ad campaign. "Tolerance needs to be taught at a young age. It's hard to take a 16-year-old kid who's a skin head and teach him to embrace tolerance," Carrier said. The five ads designed by Tolerance.org are hyper-linked to the website, which contains information, forums and news on hate groups. "Bias doesn't just happen. What are you teaching your kids?" one ad asks. "A hate crime occurs every hour. You can do something to stop it," says another. Each message ends with an admonition to "fight hate and promote tolerance." Carrier estimates that 40 million people will see the ads before the end of the year, based on an analysis of Yahoo's Web traffic.