Kanoodling for serious business?
Kanoodle.com has just resurrected the concept behind Sprinks by hiring the core Sprinks executive team and raising VC money to develop its contextual ad business. Before its acquisition by Google in late October, Sprinks was the contextual advertising arm of Primedia. Unlike Google's AdSense or Overture Content Match, Sprinks relied on matching ads to content by "topics" rather than contextual relevancy determined through text analysis of the full text of a page. Sprinks had attracted a growing number of business and technology-related sites, including Forbes.com and Cnet. As foreseen in my paper on Contextual Ads, the impetus behind the Google acquisition of Sprinks was access to the attractive Web properties on which to place ads (which included the About.com sites), not the methodology for matching ads to content used by Sprinks.

With the new resources provided by Kanoodle.com, Lance Podell, who was named President of the content division of Kanoodle, has an opportunity to expand the concept behind the previous Sprinks to a wider group of sites in the Kanoodle.com network. But, it may be wise to specialize rather than try to compete with Google and Overture in all categories. Sprinks had a nice start with business and technology sites. I'd like to see Podell and his team continue on a focused path wherein advertisers and content sites are more tightly aligned. This would provide some reassurance to reputable business publishers that want some control over the advertising that appears on their sites. And, let's hope that with access to Kanoodle.com's text analysis technology, ad matching won't rely strictly on selecting topics, but will be made richer through a combination of both techniques.