The “contextual” advertising market will reach $5 billion by 2006, as more providers continue to jump on the bandwagon as companies gravitate toward more contextually relevant Web advertising and search engine optimization and away from mass e-mail and telemarketing, said a study by the Meta Group.
Meta also predicted that smaller commercial search vendors and larger companies with search services will begin vying for market share currently held by market leaders Yahoo and Google.
The market research firm also predicted that giants America Online and Microsoft Network would either acquire commercial search services, including contextual advertising services, or release their own systems by 2005. This would result in the commercial Internet search and contextual advertising market being dominated exclusively by Yahoo, Google, AOL, and MSN by 2006.
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