• by Tameka Kee , September 16, 2008

There's a new search advertising company and engine in town, and its name isn't Cuil.

It's tyBit, an offshoot of Fayetteville, N.C.-based Web hosting company AIT, and it averaged more than 50 million searches in August. TyBit offers white-label site search and a search toolbar, as well as a search ad network, and has reeled in more than 6,000 advertisers during its stealth beta testing period. According to CEO Clarence Briggs, the engine is coming out of beta, with its sights set on helping print and broadcast providers snag a slice of the search pie.

"It's no secret that traditional print and media companies are struggling, and they haven't been able to make up the ad spend they're losing through interactive yet," Briggs said. "The current model of online advertising and revenue sharing is broken. With tyBit, they can run search on their site, let advertisers sign up automatically and keep a significant amount of the revenue."

Partners that run tyBit on their site get 30% of the revenue generated and 40% of the revenue from searches carried out by users that download their toolbar. Briggs said the revenue splits are viable because site owners don't incur any setup costs, and can get the engine integrated on their site within hours. The engine, which indexes content from other engines and data sources, also customizes results based on user habits over time. The tech has been in development for almost two-and-a-half years, with the ad segment in testing for the past 10 months.

TyBit also counts telecommunications companies (including ISPs), software companies and original equipment manufacturers OEMs (such as automotive or aircraft giants) as part of its target, since those kinds of companies typically have large, readily monetizable subscriber bases. "They have those eyeballs before everyone else does," Briggs said. "Before an Internet user even gets to Google or Yahoo, they have to log in, or power up."

Site owners can customize the look and feel of the search function, which is currently averaging 2.1 million queries across tyBit's network per day. In terms of ads, there are text, image, audio and video units available, and marketers can set up campaigns directly through the publisher's page, or via tyBit.com.

In addition to standard pay-per-click (PPC) ads, tyBit also offers a model called "keyword position"-based buys, which allow an advertiser to bid for a particular keyword for 24-72 hours. In this way, they are guaranteed coverage and prime positioning for a fixed cost, instead of having to pay per click.

"So a florist can bid for the word "roses" for Valentine's Day," Briggs said. "And they can own that word in whatever position before, during and after the holiday, for a fixed fee, regardless of the amount of clicks that come in." The keyword position bids, like the standard PPC bids, can be geo- and ZIP code-targeted.

Briggs said that the company would eventually get out of the sales channel business, once the publisher network was large enough to support the volume of searchers. "At some point, we're going to cut our ads loose and not compete with the channel," he said. "We needed to sign up many of the advertisers to beta test it, but eventually we'll be out of the retail side and just develop the engine. And we'll take any of the revenue from tyBit.com and distribute it to our partners."