In what company officials are calling a "moment of arrival," About, Inc.'s pay per click
Sprinks division on Monday signed a deal with AOL. The deal brings
Sprinks' pay-per-click, content-targeted sponsored links to areas within Netscape, CompuServe, and the AOL Instant Messenger Service.
Joel Davidson, Executive Vice President of AOL Web Properties,
said the agreement offers AOL "an effective way to present highly relevant advertising to improve our user experience across these three important AOL brands. Sprinks brings with it a heritage in
content publishing that translates into a unique product that provides advertisers a great way to reach the consumers who are likely to seek their services."
Lance Podell, General Manager of
Sprinks, hinted that the AOL deal is not the company's crowning achievement yet. He said Yahoo's test of Sprinks' products went well enough that the two companies are working to roll out Sprinks
services more broadly on the portal.
According to company officials, one of the key differences between Sprinks, Google and Overture and that Sprinks "does not believe in mapping content to
keywords," unlike Google and Overture. "Page scanning for keywords yields unpredictable and often irrelevant results, Sprinks maintains, so instead the company has advertisers buy by topic so that the
results always make sense.
Sprinks offers two different platforms. ContentSprinks allows advertisers to bid for sponsored links placement on relevant editorial pages. DirectSprinks allows
advertisers to bid for premium placement through content-targeted listings in various opt-in newsletters. Sprinks gives advertisers a system to buy and create text ads specifically for content pages
and email newsletters. Additionally, advertisers can manage and edit the distinct campaigns and receive reporting that delineates results for either of the Sprinks sponsored links offerings.
ContentSprinks and DirectSprinks were developed specifically for About.com. Responding to advertiser demand, Sprinks launched an external publisher network that now includes Forbes, CBS
MarketWatch, CNET Networks, iVillage, eUniverse, Burst! Media, advertising.com and AOL Web Properties.