MediaPost: Trouble Already with "The Next Big Thing"

MediaPost's Adam Guild sees trouble ahead, fueled by paid search businesses' expansion into contextual ad serving on non-search sites. It is true that the contextual area is fraught with risk, but the examples provided in Guild's story (where ads are morbidly targeted or just plain whacky relative to their context) will be seen less and less.

In a test of Google's AdSense (as a publisher on the BRIEFME.COM archives), the system became more effective in targeting almost immediately. The test's clickthrough rate on the overall inventory shot up as the system tried ads and rotated the ones that got clicks, while eliminating the ones that did not. The system proved self-healing.

If the initial targeting decision made by AdSense is wrong (as defined by clicks), the system changes its targeting criteria to find a better fit. It's quite Darwinian. A poorly targeted ad-to-page situation will be short-lived. The risks lie more in the quality of the clickthrough. Care must be taken by marketers to test and react if they see drops in conversion based on source.