Breaking News Powering Contextual Ad Sales
What do you do when you're a tiny business in the U.K. selling backup intranet services and you see the news of a major blackout in the U.S. come across your computer screen? If you're like the folks behind emergencyintranet.com, you whisk on to Google's AdSense and quickly bid for placing ads in search result terms relating to the blackout - and in a flash increase your Web site traffic more than 40 times, according to WSJ Online. Compare this to the fate of many newspaper outlets, whose blackout stories were late, thin and fairly free of advertisements. Contextual advertising is proving again and again that the "where" and "when" of contextual content placement is a highly quantifiable value that cannot be underestimated - for large and small publishers and advertisers alike.