Proximic, a contextual advertising company, has signed a deal with Yahoo Shopping as well as Shopping.com to advertise roughly 50 million items from their inventories (20 million from each of these two companies and an additional 10 million from other companies). It works through a widget that can be embedded in any web page, displaying ads relevant to the content on the page.
Sounds like nothing new, right? Well, read those numbers again. 50 million items. I don’t have the official numbers for Google’s AdSense, but the folks at Proximic claim that AdSense’s entire inventory has around one million unique ads. With its enormous reach Proximic can display many more items and, more importantly, more relevant ads, which delivers better results.
Proximic’s secret apparently lies in the mind of a computer chess expert Thomas Nitsche, who helped design a new way of delivering contextual ads, based on the shape of words, and not the actual words. This enables them to match the text on a page with an ad through the similarity of word shapes - a much more efficient method than simple usage of keywords.
If you want to see how the technology works, you can try it out through a Firefox add-on; it doesn’t display ads, it displays relevant links and information based on what you’re currently browsing. If you’re a publisher, you can try out the publisher widget, but be careful; if you’re already using AdSense, it might be against the TOS to slap Proximic’s widget alongside AdSense (or other contextual ads.)
[via VentureBeat]
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