WebProNews

The year-old New York-based contextual advertising company has seen rapid growth and an influx of new VC funding.

I heard from a spokesperson for ContextWeb recently, citing the smaller firm's increasing challenge to the entrenched powers of Google AdSense and Yahoo's Context Match. She mentioned the company's work with publishers AP and Better Homes and Gardens, and advertisers Delta and Vonage, and invited further inquiries.

So I asked the obvious question: "What can ContextWeb deliver to help it compete with the likes of AdSense and Content Match?" I received this in response:

"Yahoo's ContextMatch only looks at keywords, not categories and keywords like ContextWeb does. ContextWeb scans for both - for example, if someone is reading about travel to Paris, the technology will identify the word "Paris" (category) and keywords such as "Left Bank" or "Eiffel Tower" so that the possibility of them seeing an ad for Paris Hilton's latest video is eliminated. Only those ads that are highly relevant will be served.

"Yahoo's ContentMatch also does not operate in real-time and depends on spidering technology to scan pages. Yahoo also only offers text-based ads, whereas ContextWeb offers advertisers the choice of text-based or graphical advertisements.

"Google's AdSense has similar limitations to ContentMatch. Google cannot work with dynamic content and also uses spidering technology to scan pages. It, too, just scans for keywords on a page so the ads generated are not always relevant to content."

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.