Can a Swiss upstart help turn the online advertising market on its head with its “EBay for online ads”?
Although Google is doubtless a giant in the online advertising market, with its Adsense and Adwords applications, new players such as Swiss startup ADS-click S.A. believe they can take advertising platforms a step further. According to ADS-click, online advertising will be soon traded electronically in all available formats, from mobile to video, and will include more than just the sponsored links that dominate the Web today.
In spite of the Web’s evolution into what pundits like to call “Web 2.0”, the online advertising market still suffers from a lack of transparency and low user centricity; users are still seeking out advertisements rather than advertisements finding them. One interesting approach to this problem is ADS-exchange, developed by ADS-click. “Think of it as "The New York Stock Exchange" of online ads, where people can bid for advertising space in all possible formats in real-time,” says Pascal Rossini, CEO of ADS-click and the former founder of web service provider Netvertis.The ADS-exchange network will be managed by publishers, advertisers and agencies, rather than by intermediaries such as Google. “In a nutshell, ADS-exchange is the Ebay for online ads, where publishers and advertisers will meet to do businesses transparently,” says Jude Ngu'Ewodo, General partner with Baytech Venture Capital, which put $4 million in Series A funding into ADS-click in March.
ADS-click’s application distributes ads on the web and on mobile phones from a single ad marketplace that gives web and mobile advertisers the convenience of a single access point for managing their advertising campaign, budgets with a choice of different business models, such as pay-per-click or pay per impression. On top of the automatic contextual ads display, it also lets them target their audience by different criteria, such as location, behavior, vertical categories or keywords.
Rossini believes that this business is taking off, with other players endorsing a similar strategy, among them Right Media, Quigo and the new Double-Click solution. He expects such online advertising exchanges to comprise some 15% of the online advertising market.
