contextual advertising

So as a web publisher, I have spent my professional life finding ways to monetize my web content. Aside from a few spectacularly successful individual advertisements, the bulk of this work has been experimenting with different ad networks like FastClick, Burst, etc. These all sort of operate the same, group publishers into categories like technology or automotive, then sell ads to big advertisers like Ford or HP based on these categories. Google has capitalized on this obviously rash generalization with Adsense, which allows advertisters to do small media buys based on keywords, to huge success.

So what if Google doesn’t want you anymore? I have heard rumors that Yahoo Publishers is in serious alpha, but is not even contemplating a public beta until the fall. This space is wide open and Google needs competitors. Barriers to entry? The seriously large amounts of data and computing power needed to do effective contextual advertising. Only Yahoo and MSN could easily be serious competitors. But what if you did tag based contextual advertising, like technorati does for searching. I tag this post Adsense Alternatives and someone searching for it finds it. But what if I was someone who wanted to advertise on the keyword Adsense? Could you effectively target ads via tagging? Not likely, as every publisher out there would try to game that system for the highest paying keywords……. Still, a wide open market.

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