Start-up company Proximic may be set to challenge Google's AdSense service after announcing it has signed an agreement with Yahoo! Shopping Network and eBay's Shopping.com.The deal, which is based on advertising syndication, will bring Proximic's ad inventory to almost 50 million placements.
Proximic estimates that, in contrast, Google has an inventory of around one million unique ads.
Under the terms of the agreement, prospective advertisers will be able to place an ad widget on their sites. Proximic will then index these sites and place contextually matching products as text ads, along with contextually relevant content links.
Proximic intends to give participating websites 70 per cent of any revenues left after eBay and Yahoo! have taken their cut.
According to TechCrunch, what makes the firm different from its competitors is that it does not come up with matches based on keywords, like Google. Rather, it uses proximity analysis.
Thomas Nitsche, chief technical officer at Proximic, described the process thus: "We look at patterns of letters. We get a profile. The profile is a vector. We compare two vectors and compute proximity by pattern distance.
"We can generate proximity between texts. The text can be one word, two words, 15 words, or a complete page."
Meanwhile, in an interview with Internetnews.com, Proximic chief executive officer Philipp Pieper stated: "Not only do we use different technology, we do placement differently. We don't take a look at words - the things we identify are character sets."
