In case you haven’t heard, there’s an online ad explosion going on. And it’s creating such a seller’s market in Web ad space that Web publishers are starting to look for new ways to skim off more of that revenue.
At least, that’s the contention of MIVA Corp., which operates a number of business lines that serve Web advertisers, publishers and sellers—most notably its MIVA contextual ad network. And it’s the growing demand for new ways to get ads onto a page that has led MIVA to develop and launch MIVA Inline, a new ad/ search hybrid product that will be delivered within an article, as the name suggests.
MIVA Inline crawls publishers’ sites and adds hyperlinks to the content on the page. When users mouse over these highlighted links, a floating text box appears with an ad related to the content being viewed. Users can choose to click on the ad or continue browsing the site.
Filtering software and a team of human editors will make sure that keywords are not tagged in sensitive or inappropriate articles, such as airline wrecks or murder investigations. Publishers will be able to customize the MIVA Inline implementation to suit the design of their Web sites, and to specify both the pages and the specific content that will be used to deliver ads on their sites. They can also decide whether hyperlinks are added at every appearance of a keyword or only in the first instance, and can specify number of unique keywords tagged on a single page—up to 20.
The platform will let Web publishers who have maxed out their current ad opportunities find new ways to monetize their online content, says Seb Bishop, MIVA president and chief marketing officer. “Publishers have told me that they need to either remove content to create new real estate for ads or to invest time creating new pages,” he says. “This unique technology allows us to combine our search technology and our existing advertiser base in a way that can enhance the visitor’s experience.”
MIVA Inline can also integrate site search technology to link to other articles on a Web content site. That way, users would see a text box that offered links to two related articles from the same publisher along with a contextual ad for a merchant site. “That gives publishers a chance to generate further page impressions on their site or any other related sties they may operate,” Bishop says. “If the user stays on the site, they win in terms of greater ad exposure; if he clicks through using the contextual ad, they at least earn revenue from that click.”
And now is the right time for “independent” ad networks—read, those that aren’t Google or Yahoo!—to start approaching Web publishers with well-stocked portfolios of ad products like MIVA Inline, Bishop says. Many of these publishers have begun to see the large amounts of ad revenue that can come in over the Internet, either for display ads, banners or pay-per-click listings, and have decided that it’s important to their bottom line to keep more of that cash in-house.
Even more importantly, conflicts of interest are beginning to creep into the deals Web publishers have struck with the big search engines. In earlier days, it was easy to say that Google, Yahoo! or MSN were simply supplying search services to your content site and incidentally opening up a revenue opportunity with ads. But as the Big Three start spreading into verticals such as local search and classified ads, they’re beginning to look as much like competitors as partners to some big Web publishers.
In fact, some large Web operators are already making moves to reduce their dependence on the Google and Yahoo! ad networks. Just this week, ESPN.com opted to discontinue its partnership with Yahoo!’s contextual network and to start selling its own ads using an auction platform from Quigo. Within a day, jobs classified site Careerbuilder.com announced that it too would start selling its own brand of contextual ads, also using the Quigo platform.
Bishop believes this trend will accelerate as it becomes clear that Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft intend to extend their reach beyond search into other Web content and functions that may drive traffic to their sites. “Once you place those Google or Yahoo! ads on your Web site, they have visibility into which of your pages generate the most impressions, and what kind of content and which particular articles people are most interested in,” he says. “So if they come out with a product that’s similar to yours, they’ve got the best market research in the world because they actually had visibility into your Web site for a while.”
Such was the case with CNET, which used Yahoo! contextual ads for about a year and a half. Then this May, Yahoo! launched a site that offered technology and electronics reviews that seemed to compete for impressions with CNET’s lucrative review content. CNET now sells its own advertising.
Bishop says that while MIVA’s ad network has gotten good traction with large Web content sites in Europe, many of the largest U.S. sites are still locked into ad-placement deals that they signed with Google or Yahoo! several years ago. But as those deals expire, he says, more Web publishers will opt to go with independent ad networks that don’t aspire to portal status or license ad platforms that let them sell their own ads.
“If you’re a publisher, you certainly don’t want to rely on a competitor for your revenue,” he says.