Is it a hyperlink? Or is it an ad?
An emerging company is also set to make Web editorial content more ad-friendly by taking its boundaries away.
Vibrant Media develops a service called IntelliTxt that links editorial "keywords" to promotions. Taking advantage of the ubiquity of hyperlinks in news stories, it highlights and underlines selected words within copy to signify that it's pegged to an ad. When readers send their cursor over the word, a box appears with a promotional message. Clicking on the word will take readers to the advertisers' Web site.
In one example, a story on BetaNews (an IntelliTxt customer) about Microsoft's game strategy links the words "Internet access" to an ad for AOL's 9.0 Optimised premium Web access package. Microsoft's own name in the opening paragraph features an ad for a tablet PC.
Other companies have tried similar offerings without publishers' sign-off -- and without success. In 2001, Microsoft developed technology called Smart Tags, which linked keywords to Web pages of Microsoft's choice. The software giant had plans to include the tags in the browser bundled with the release of Windows XP but reversed course, after facing a flood of criticism.
Similarly, a company called eZula has drawn complaints from publishers, because its text ads appear on top of their content without their permission.
Vibrant is attempting to avert those foils by giving publishers reign over it.
The company has been in stealth mode for more than a year and is now making some noise, having signed up other publishing customers, including Hearst and The Motley Fool, as well as opening a US operation. Search heavyweight Overture has also quietly partnered with Vibrant to extend pitches of its more than 100,000 advertisers to the programme.
The technology is complementary to Overture's, because it relies on syncing keyword ads to the context of a Web page, or what's called contextual advertising. It scours pages to discern their meaning and deliver related ads. What's different is that the contextual ad networks of Overture and Google relegate text ads to the margins of Web pages, whereas Vibrant's customers buy in to feature ads in the content.
"We're fulfilling the promise of contextual advertising -- it has been in the back of the class, where banner blindness exists," said Doug Stevenson, who founded the company in 2000. "This delivers higher response rates for advertisers by their being linked to content in a relevant way."
Vibrant has $2m from angel investors and Fortis Bank in the UK. It plans to make $25m in revenue this year, and has been profitable for the last year and a half, according to Stevenson, who was previously the head of ecommerce at America Online.
Still, analysts say response rates for contextual ads pale in comparison to sponsored search. What's more, people may be confused by the nature of hyperlinked ads.
"Isn't that a little misleading? The Internet is all about links to other information -- people could feel like they're being deceived a bit," said GartnerG2's Garcia.
CNET News.com's Evan Hansen contributed to this report.
