Kanoodle’s new team of contextual advertising executives which came over to Kanoodle after the Google acquisition of Sprinks Inc. is planning on offering their own contextual advertising solution to compete with Google AdSense.
Since moving to Kanoodle, Lance Podell, president; Doug Perlson, senior vice president, partner development and operations; and Mark Josephson, senior vice president, marketing and business development—has launched a Sprinks-like sponsored-listings service called ContextTarget. Kanoodle has since signed up such major sites as MarketWatch.com Inc., The Motley Fool Inc. and Intuit Inc.’s Quicken.com for the ContextTarget service – most impressive partners.
According to eWeek, Kanoodle plans to expand ContextTarget past the big partners and to everyday web publishers as competition for the Google AdSense program and Quigo.
In the second quarter of this year, Kanoodle.com plans to offer an automated version of ContextTarget to Web publishers, not unlike Google’s AdSense program that puts its AdWords sponsored links alongside Web content, Josephson said.
Google officials were not available to discuss the company’s future plans for its Sprinks acquisition, but the company did confirm that it is not currently using any of the products or technology acquired from Sprinks. Company officials, in past interviews, said that former Sprinks customers were offered Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs.
“ContextTarget represents a quantum leap ahead in content-targeted sponsored links for both advertisers and publishers,” said Lance Podell, president of Kanoodle.com’s Content Division. “It is the only product in the space that is independent from keyword search advertising, so advertisers can plan, buy, measure and optimize their content buys separately from their search buys. For publishers, we are offering multiple forms of ad blocking and guarantee that we will only run relevant ads so they don’t have to worry about inappropriate ads appearing next to their content.”
Kanoodle will however have some steep competition in Google. According to a report covering the WebMasterWorld conference last month, over 50% of the top 100 media metrics properties use AdSense, which reaches 80% of the Internet population.
Kanoodle may have two ups on Google’s AdSense. One, Kanoodle lets advertisers bid on contextual ads separately from search engine sponsored links. Studies have shown that some contextual targeting does not show the same conversion results as search engine listings – which should lead to a different pricing/bidding system. Two, Kanoodle supports mature or adult advertising in its search enigne advertising – if they decide to let sites with mature content show their ContextTarget ads, Kanoodle will swiftly pick up the top money making sector of paid content sites on the web which Google AdSense does not allow to show their ad strips – adult sites.
