• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 11, 2005

Time Warner's Turner Sports Interactive has chosen Kanoodle as the exclusive provider of sponsored ad links on two of its sites, Nascar.com and PGA.com, the companies said Wednesday. Under terms of the multi-year deal, Kanoodle will provide sponsored links on both the content pages and search results pages of each site. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Other publishers with exclusive sponsored link partnerships with Kanoodle include MSNBC.com and MarketWatch.com.

Contextual advertising firms such as Kanoodle appear to be drawing attention from other players in the interactive world these days. At the end of last month, online technology company Marchex acquired contextual marketing company IndustryBrains for $30.6 million.

Lance Podell, Kanoodle's CEO, said he offers advertisers the ability to have their text ads appear on specific pages of sites. There seems to be a demand on the part of advertisers for that sort of control; Google recently announced several updates to its AdSense program, one of which gives advertisers the power to select which sites they want to appear on.

But the smaller contextual firms also have a reputation for changing a premium compared to Google and Yahoo! Podell said the reason for the higher fees is that marketers bid more for placement in Kanoodle's network. He estimated that Kanoodle's average keyword bid is 70 cents, while the average minimum bid is 20 cents.