Contextual Ad Company Pools Its Advertisers

A new contextual advertising company is pooling the advertisers from its various ad network distribution partners into a single sales channel, giving publishers access to more than 500,000 paid listings.

The company, Chitika, Inc., has advertiser distribution agreements with FindWhat.com and its European subsidiary, Espotting, and Search123; it is in talks with five other ad networks, according to company representatives.

Chitika President and CEO Venkat Kolluri said that, while the companies Quigo and Kanoodle have similar services, "their reach is restricted by the advertising partners in their network."

Kolluri said Chitika allows publishers to pull advertising from multiple sources without having to rely heavily on one network provider for revenue. "The result is freedom of choice," he said.

Chitika sends publishers a line of API code they place in their banner, leaderboard, or skyscraper units, where the contextual listings will appear. Then, like other contextual providers, Chitika's product crawls the publisher's pages in real-time, determining the context. After, it crawls its partner networks to find the appropriate matching advertiser.

Kolluri said his company's wide pool of advertisers could be a potential one-stop shop for publishers; he added that Chitika's tracking analytics software keeps tabs on user ad-interaction, adapting future placements to users' previous click-through history.

Chitika currently serves text-based contextual listings, as does Kanoodle, but according to Kolluri, the company can also serve image ads.

Publishers split revenue with Chitika. The product is free to implement, and publishers determine the sales model. Kolluri said Chitika serves text links for "thousands" of smaller Web publishers and portals across the United States, Asia, and the countries in the European Union.

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