Proximic takes on Google AdSense
By Jason Menayan January 16th, 2008Entering the shopping ad network is newcomer Proximic, a CPC contextual ad network that will aggregate 50 million merchant listings from Yahoo Shopping and eBay’s Shopping.com. Their entry into a field of contextual shopping ad networks currently populated by Chitika, ShoppingAds and (partially) eBay is significant for the following reasons:
- it will pay publishers on a per-click basis (CPC), as opposed to a per-action/sale (CPA) basis employed by eBay
- it boasts 50 million product listings, a stab at Google AdSense, with an estimated 1 million unique ads in circulation at any given time
- it uses a more sophisticated contextual matching algorithm that searches for patterns of characters (“word shape”), making it language-independent and avoiding false matches that keyword-based matching traditionally used by its competitors is prone to (think ads for Mrs. Fields embedded in an article on how to clear cookies from your browser)
Of course, the number of ads/listings is not everything–this is a wide variation in the types of products that each of these networks carries. But Proximic would likely have the largest inventory of product listings that pay publishers on a per-click basis. And, because eBay AdContext is not openly available to all publishers (although it is available via YieldBuild), Proximic will the largest shopping ad network with respect to number of available listings. It will be the largest CPC shopping ad network, regardless.
But make no mistake, Proximic’s big foe is AdSense, the most recognized and deployed contextual ad solution for publishers (and a multibillion dollar revenue generator for Google). And despite adding another intermediary layer between advertiser and buyer, Proximic hopes to demonstrate its competitive value with substantially higher click-through: its tests claim CTRs of 1.5%, compared to the 0.25% seen with Google.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 16th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
[...] the rest here: Proximic takes on Google AdSense blog, ebay, faq, online advertising, shopping, takes on google, [...]
January 16th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
[...] Jason Menayan wrote an interesting post today on Proximic takes on Google AdSenseHere’s a quick excerptAnd despite adding another intermediary layer between advertiser and buyer, Proximic hopes to demonstrate its competitive value with substantially higher click-through: its tests claim CTRs of 1.5%, compared to the 0.25% seen by Google. [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Jason – your data is completely flawed – not sure where you got it from.
I work for Chitika, and we have MANY ad partners – one of which is Shopping.com (20 million+ product advertisements alone) .
Add to this a palette of several other merchants (both aggregates such as Shopping.com and direct merchants as well) and you can see that your comment of “Chitika which serves ads for much smaller comparison engines, that lack the breadth or brand trust of eBay and Yahoo” is completely off-base.
January 18th, 2008 at 11:46 am
We’ve updated the chart with Chitika’s most recent information – they, in fact, work with the same Shopping.com and Yahoo Shopping that Proximic does, and a host of other vendors, pushing their estimated number of product listings at any one time to 75 million. (In all fairness, we used a quote from Chitika’s website that they have acknowledged was out of date).