Release Date: 2009-05-18
Original Link: http://presszoom.com/story_148668.html
Source: Kontera
The online content and advertising industry is a dynamic, fast changing environment where new and creative ideas are constantly being introduced. In Text Advertising, an innovative player in the internet advertising landscape continues to grow popular amongst online publishers, advertisers and users. The following is a recent interview with Assaf Henkin, Vice President of Products and Co- founder of Kontera In Text Advertising network.
(PressZoom.com) - The online content and advertising industry is a dynamic, fast changing environment where new and creative ideas are constantly being introduced. It is fascinating to note that only a few short years ago, in the early 2000’s, In-Text PPC Advertising was still the new kid on the block. As the online advertising landscape has undergone many changes in recent years, the In-Text Advertising industry has evolved immensely in this short period.
Today, we are glad to interview Kontera’s Vice President of Products and one of the company’s founders, Assaf Henkin, whom we want to ask more about the evolution of In Text Advertising.
For starters, can you tell us a little bit about the history of Kontera In-text? What sparked the idea? When did the technology first get developed?
Kontera and the In-Text vision behind Kontera started with the idea of connecting information online. Meaning that instead of users using search engines to search for information, the question we asked ourselves is how can we proactively link keyword phrases and help users connect to additional information? So we started with an application where users could click on different keyword phrases and get relevant information from different content sources, product reviews, encyclopedias, commercial information etc. However, the business evolution prompted us to go more towards advertising and that’s how in text advertising evolved as a subset of In-Text information.
If you think about it, advertising is information and our vision from day one has been to make advertising relevant and useful enough so it’s used as an additional information source. In the last 18 months we’re going back to fulfilling that promise with our Hybrid product that combines related content and advertising. The future holds exactly that. Our mission is to connect the entire web. The idea is that every page with text online would have several links powered by Kontera. These could be links to ads and/or related information. Our duty, role and responsibility are to make these links relevant and useful so that they’ll become a powerful information tool for users.
What did the market look like when Kontera first emerged?
The market was much less sophisticated-we were pretty much the pioneers of this type of information browsing and consumption. The market was nascent in the sense of both advertising and content consumption. You didn’t have any mature syndication models, distribution, RSS, information consolidation-things which are obvious today. So what we did back then was very revolutionary. Advertising was also in its very early stages. There were no sophisticated metrics, monitoring or advanced measurement.
Today, the online ad and information market are very different and Kontera is a natural fit in this world because of our level of relevancy, targeting, and the utility value we provide users and the level of performance we bring to advertisers.
Did you have to convince the market back then?
Obviously introducing a new product to the market requires some education. Some publishers were standoff-ish, as they didn’t want to have any automatic mechanism that would add links to their pages. BUT, this is a few years back. Today, we see a constantly growing adoption rate. The evolution of user-information consumption is also to our benefit, because the model is no longer confined to search and portals alone.
For example, today, while visiting an a Yahoo or AOL page, users will also interact with content from external sources using widgets, RSS feeds, and other products that AOL implemented which are not necessarily controlled by the site managers or editors. A site’s editors control its content and articles, but there are a lot of other dynamic components that change every time the user will refresh the page. The change is based on who the user is, their geographical location, the evolving inventory, and this is something that is similar to what Kontera does. Every time the user views a page that is utilizing our technology, we will select different Keywords, we can show different content and different ads. In a sense, the market is becoming more and more open to having less control and trusting technology as long as the technology delivers positive user experience.
What more can we look forward to in 2009 in terms of new development?
We’ve just completed a major release of our Publisher Center and by mid to end 2009 we’re going to do a new release of our Ad Center-our dashboard for advertisers. We’re also working on some innovative content units and ad units that are part of partnerships with some of the larger media companies and ad agencies in the market.
Where do you think the In-Text technology is going in the coming future, how do you believe it will be embedded in peoples’ online behavior?
As I said before, we see In-Text as an inseparable medium for users to interact with information and the better job we do at it, the more interlined it will be with users lives’ online. Furthermore, we view In-Text as a very powerful product for mobile information and consumption because of the small devices and small footprints that mobile devices offer. We are also looking at IP TV or the TV and video implementation online. Think about video content, or the way TV and movie companies are consumed online today. It is clear that a few years from now, more and more people will watch their favorite TV shows online, using a computer. For our technology it would be a natural extension- a medium where, based on semantic meaning, and on a set of other parameters, additional information could be offered to the user. This is another area where we expect that In-Text will become popular in the next coming years.
Pay Per Click In Text Advertising by Kontera: www.kontera.com