WebProNews

Contextual Ad Exploitation

As an advertiser and a publisher I have ad CTR data spanning hundreds of millions of impressions and about a million ad clicks across a wide array of verticals.

News as a Commodity

In my last post about how contextual advertising targets the weak and poor, I promoted the idea of niche publishers shifting to sell niche products and services directly as a better means of monetization.

Search Engines Say The Darnedest Things

Dynamic keyword insertion for contextual advertising has its drawbacks, like making one's ad look like the advertiser engages in human trafficking.

Like Adulterous Women? Google Can Help

Google makes what you might call "moral" judgments with whom is expressly forbidden from advertising on its network. Adultery, though, is apparently not a topic the company will take a stance against.

AOL Pings Quigo For Acquisition

Quigo and its AdSonar network became the latest in a string of advertising company acquisitions made by AOL in 2007.

MySpace Starting Contextual, Targeted Advertising

paidContent reports that MySpace will launch contextual, targeted advertising on its members’ profiles starting soon. After six months of testing with a 100-member team in MySpace’s parent corporation, their system will analyze the content of members’ profile pages and display relevant ads alongside the content.

Affiliate Summit: Contextual Advertising Options

Pick something - a Web browser, toothpaste, whatever - that you’ve set against comparable products.  Maybe you gave those alternatives a fair chance, and came back to Product #1 in the end, anyway.  As Joel Comm weighed various contextual advertising options at Affiliate Summit 2007 East, it seemed like that same sort of circular journey was taking place, but you won’t hear me complain; it’s always nice to have extra choices.

LookSmart Puts AdCenter Into Context

LookSmart just added contextual ad serving and optimization to its AdCenter platform. With the addition publishers are given more control over the relevance and appearance of ads appearing on websites.

NYT Loves The Cocaine?

And we have yet another example of the distance contextual advertising has to go. When a New York Times advertisement pops up above a guide to the Big Apple's cocaine scene, there is clearly more work to be done – unless the NYT would actually endorse such a thing. The ad is covered in a thick layer of irony, informing its target market that the Times is the "ultimate guide to global travel," advising on:

AdCenter Labs Features New Toys

New tools at Microsoft's adCenter allow people to forecast keyword impression counts and demographics, and to detect location details from a search query. The Geographic Detection tool works in a straightforward manner. Submit a query with a prominent destination like a business or lankmark, and it can provide additional details – city, state, region, or country – about it.