Overture Releases Contextual Ad Product

from the trying-to-compete dept

Overture has finally caught up to Google and is releasing their own contextual advertising offering. Overture says they've been working on this solution for four to six months - which is actually a bit surprising. Google launched their own such effort four months ago. At the time, the news reports all said Overture had a similar program that was just about ready to launch. However, if you compare timelines, it sounds like Overture was caught unaware by the Google program and have scrambled to get it set up. Overture also says their system uses human editors instead of a complete technology matching solution. They point out that an automated solution can give you very bad results - such as an ad for a knife story on a page about someone murdered with a knife. The biggest difference in strategy is in distribution. While Google has just launched their program to get their ads on as many pages as possible, via a "self-signup" system, Overture says they're only looking for "high quality" sites. I'm guessing this is really a technology limitation (which is also why they're using human editors) rather than a real business strategy. However, they have this great quote, which should endear Overture to all the A-list blog kids: "If you're an advertiser, do you really want to be on someone's blog?" Of course, right now, I'd bet the answer for many advertisers is "hell, yes, we want to advertise on some blogs."

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