Categories and Players in Contextual Advertising

As the growing number of Web 2.0 rely on advertising as their main source of revenues, I read with interest a great summary published by SearchViews, on the four types of contextual advertising.

• Search-based Contextual: serves ads matching the content of a site/page as precisely as possible.
  Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network are by far the two largest players, with AskJeeves having recently launched their own network.
• Channel-Based Contextual: serves ads largely based on the targets/demographics of the channel (site or portion of a site).
  Value Click is the largest player in the space.
• Behaviorally-Based Contextual: tracks users across a network of affiliated sites in order to build a profile, that is then used to target the user with relevant ads, as well as generate off-line sales leads.
  Tacoda and Blue Lithium are mentioned, and I would add Revenue Science.
• In-Line Advertising: these are the big, annoying, roll-over ads that pop-up if you get too close to them on certain site, or even are displayed on top of the text.
  Vibrant Media is one of the providers of these ads.

Worth a read.

Comments

[Ted Rheingold]

Seems to me they're missing our favorite, user-based contextual advertising. We use Revenue Science as our text ad server as they serve ads based upon the profile of our users.

This way we can serve ads taregted to women with college degrees in households of $70k and up, instead of just ads related to the content of the page.

In June I wrote about how I expect user-based context to overtake content-based ads serving. In fact I expect the publisher to have much much more control over waht ads should be served as it's in their best interest to serve ads that actually get clicked on. If no one clicks 'mesolothemia' then you get no money. The ad providers will want their publishers to gernerate as many clicks as possible so they'll prefer this too (as long as they are extra vigilant about new types of abuse ;)

[Brent]

Well I'll be really keen to see what MSN and Yahoo are going to do about the click fraud problem. It's still a problem (as we know) with Google, and will likely remain to be.

The other thing about Ads by Yahoo and ContentAds by MSN, is oversaturation. Just with Google Adsense/Adwords alone, we see these ads EVERYWHERE it seems. My concern is what the internet will look like when all three networks are up and running.

Will there soon be contextual ad blindness? Hmmm.....I sure hope not. My banker, my wife, and my kids sure hope not ;-)

Brent

[Web2earn]

Cool blog and I think you mentioned some relevant aspects of contextual ads here. Of course, any web entrepreneur should know that the single most important resource of the Internet are website visitors. If you don't have them, you can't run a business… or, in our case, you won't find any advertisers that would take interest into displaying their links on your site. With my websites, I use a strategy that does not have immediate effects and deprives you of instant monetary satisfaction. I “age” my sites without the ads, marketing them and optimizing them without any contextual ad program on them. This makes it easy to get high PR link partners, have the site listed in various non-commercial directories and so on. In fact, I am doing exactly this with my website, Web2earn.com where I am also trying to develop different informational resources on online advertising and provide my visitors with contextual advertising information

Regards,

Michael