• by Phil Leggiere , August 24, 2006

While search advertising has pioneered a real-time auctioning model for ad buying, display ads still operate on a fixed rate-card model. Ad network firm Experclick is out to challenge that model with an online ad exchange designed for display ads.

Advertisers specify the audience they want to reach based on contextual, behavioral, or demographic factors, and then "bid" on how much they're willing to pay per impression, per click, or per action. When a visitor lands on a page in the network, Experclick's proprietary price engine SpotPrice compares impression bids, and the highest bid wins.

Another Experclick tool, SpotBot, tracks ad effectiveness per spot. The system allows advertisers to search existing ad pages and bid on them by a viewer's recent search queries, content categories, age, gender, income, and geography. A frequency-capping function prevents visitors from seeing any one ad too often.