Web Ad.vantage Internet Marketing Blog

Google Knol: The First Real Challenge to Wikipedia?
Jul 24, 2008 - In the search landscape, Wikipedia has been dominating first page search results on practically any subject for years, and continues to be one of the most authoritative “go to” sites for research and quick fact checking. However, the collective wisdom of Wikipedia stems from only a small group of editors in a very top-down bureaucratic way, and a growing number of users and ex-Wiki editors have expressed discontent for the open content encyclopedia’s sometimes less than fair opinions and (...)

Solutions for Yahoo (Besides Microsoft’s Money)
Jul 23, 2008 - This article by Hollis originally appeared in ClickZ on February 12, 2008. Last week, I dealt with the sad occurrence of my father-in-law’s passing. The funeral brought together people from throughout the country because in addition to his job, his passion was coaching young swimmers, many of whom attribute their success to tenets they learned from him. For 40 years, despite few financial resources and subpar facilities, he churned out national champions year after year, earning him a National Swim (...)

Can User-Selected Advertising Improve Response Rates?
Jul 16, 2008 - This article by Hollis originally appeared in ClickZ on January 29, 2008. We’re all familiar with ad-supported content models, and even ad-motivated action models (remember those ghastly surf-for-points companies during the dot-com boom days?). The latter actually hasn’t altogether gone away, and a new breed of act-and-earn companies, like Free Laptop Nation, has cropped up. Companies like Free Laptop Nation generate high response rates for their advertisers, but how genuine is the user’s interest in the advertisers’ products or services? (...)

Retirement Wishes to Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft
Jul 01, 2008 - Perhaps its the hot hazy lazy days of summer that have some companies feeling as though it’s time to put a few things out to pasture. I’d dedicating this post to recent retirees from the big three. Google AdSense Referrals, to be retired in August. The program that allowed publishers to make $$ by referring Google products will be shut down in August and reports will be removed by late October. In response, Google is pushing users towards the (...)

Peer39 and Rise of Semantic Advertising
Jun 30, 2008 - Today, Peer39, a technology company based in NYC, launched a new advertising product, SemanticMatch™ that provides the ability to serve ads based on the meaning of a website page’s content. Unlike contextual targeting which matches ads to pre-selected keywords, SemanticMatch™ uses proprietary algorithms that can glean content meaning and sentiment down to the page level. In addition, unlike behavioral targeting ad methods, SemanticMatch doesn’t need to track user behavior or place cookies, so if effective, this product may be very (...)