February 6, 2007

New Service To Rival Google AdSense?

by Jan Harris

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Fast Search & Transfer has unveiled a new service – Fast AdMomentum – which will allow online publishers to display private-label, contextually relevant ads on their Web sites.

The service means that companies will be able to make money by selling ads to advertisers without involving an ad agency or network. It has the potential to more than double ad revenues for some publishers, compared with similar services provided by Google and Yahoo.

Fast Search & Transfer, a competitor to Google’s Enterprise Search Appliance in the corporate search market, sells AdMomentum as a software license rather than for a share of revenue, which is the business model used by Google.

Fast’s software is installed in a publisher’s data centre. It could also be used by a third party to provide an online, contextual advertising network serving smaller online publishers such as blog networks.

Fast’s customers include U.S.-based online directory Local.com, Norway’s Schibsted newspaper group and Australian search site Sensis.

Fast AdMomentum will compete with both Google’s Adsense and Panama, Yahoo’s new paid search ad-serving platform. Yahoo’s system is similar to Google’s in that it ranks ads both on price and relevancy to users.

However, some commentators are already cynical about the success of such a program, suggesting that although Fast may bring in a few big partnerships, the problems involved with running a custom-built adnetwork platform will be beyond most webmasters.

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Story link: New Service To Rival Google AdSense?

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