Type-in traffic is a term describing visitors landing at a web site by entering a word or phrase in the web browser’s address bar rather than following a hyperlink from another web page, using a browser bookmark, or a search-box search. For example, if you are interested in widgets, then instead of doing a search for ‘widgets’ you might type ‘widgets.com’ in your address bar to see if such a web site exists, and, if so, what content is there. From another perspective, if you are in the business of selling widgets, then owning the domain name ‘widgets.com’ and having an active website at that address would be a desirable thing, as you could take advantage of the targeted type-in traffic that this name receives. That simple example holds true for virtually all products and services.

Most web browsers formerly defaulted the top-level domain to com, thus entering ‘mysearchterm’ in the web browser’s address bar usually would lead the user to http://mysearchterm.com/. This behavior changed depending on the ‘default search engine’ setting in the web browser’s properties, so entering ‘mysearchterm’ in the address bar could also lead to an error page or to results from a search engine. Today most error page traffic has been taken over by browser manufacturers such as Microsoft and Netscape for the purpose of displaying paid search advertising. Much of MSN’s high ranking as a portal results from the error page traffic delivered from their dominant Internet Explorer browsers.

In the last few years advertisers, publishers and ad networks such as MSN, AOL, Google and Yahoo have awoken to the power of displaying relevant advertising to highly targeted type-in traffic from domain names, browser address bar searches and error traffic.

In November 2004 Marchex acquired the generic domain name portfolio of Name Development Ltd., a little known British Virgin Islands company, for 164 million dollars, predominantly for its 100,000+ domain name portfolio. This portfolio generated 17 million type-in traffic visitors each month.

In 2005, Highland Capital, a venture capital firm, acquired a controlling interest in BuyDomains, paying an undisclosed sum for its domain name portfolio.

In August 2005, industry trade journals such as dnjournal, dnforum and domainstate reported that sale volumes and prices of existing generic domain-names were rising rapidly as a result of type-in traffic monetization opportunities. Small webmasters can buy a domain name with type-in traffic and utilize Google’s Adsense product, or any of several traffic aggregators such as Namedrive, Fabulous, DomainSponsor, or Skenzo to display relevant advertising to the trickle of visitors coming to their domain names. Many small publishers are generating thousands of dollars each month in revenue with very little effort by building websites that serve relevant advertising to their type-in traffic visitors.

Google’s entry into the small publisher monetization space came as a result of their purchase of Applied Semantics in 2003. The drop registrar phenomenon is directly related to the value and desireability of type-in traffic domain names.

Type-in traffic does not differentiate between trademark traffic and generic traffic as it relates to domain names. For example, the act of registering coca-cola.com for one’s own commercial gain would be considered cybersquatting. However, the act of registering softdrinks.com or cola.com would likely be a defensible acquisition of a generic domain-name for type-in traffic generation or resale business opportunities.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Direct Navigation describes the method individuals use to navigate the Internet in order to arrive at specific websites. Direct Navigation is a new, loosely defined term which is generally understood to include Type-in traffic, link popularity (or Link-pop) traffic; bookmarked traffic and other forms of navigation which bypass Search Engines.

Classified advertising is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers and other periodicals. Classified advertising is usually textually based and can consist of as little as the type of item being sold, (i.e., “Clothing”) and a telephone number to call for more information (“call 555-7777″). It can also have much more detail, such as name to contact, address to contact or visit, a detailed description of the product or products (“pants and sweaters, size 10″ as opposed to “clothing”, “red 1996 Pontiac Grand Prix” as opposed to “automobile”). There are generally no pictures or other graphics within the advertisement, although sometimes a logo may be used. Classified advertising is called such because it is generally grouped within the publication under headings classifying the product or service being offered (headings such as Accounting, Automobiles, Clothing, Farm Produce, For Sale, For Rent, etc.) and is grouped entirely in a distinct section of the periodical, which makes it distinct from display advertising, which often contains graphics or other art work and which is more typically distributed throughout a publication adjacent to editorial content. A hybrid of the two forms — classified display advertising — may often be found, in which categorized advertisements with larger amounts of graphical detail can be found among the text listings of a classified advertising section in a publication. Business opportunities often use classifieds to sell their services, usually employing 1-800 numbers. Classified ads are also among the tools used by many companies in recruitment for available job opportunities.

In recent years the term “classified advertising” or “classified ads” has expanded from merely the sense of print advertisements in periodicals to include similar types of advertising on computer services, radio, and even television, particularly cable television but occasionally broadcast television as well, typically very early in the morning hours.

Like most forms of printed media, the classified ad has found its way to the Internet. Printed classified ads are typically just a few column lines in length, and they often filled with abbreviations to save space and money. Internet classified ads do not typically use per-line pricing models, so they tend to be longer. They are also more readily searchable unlike their offline brethren, and tend to be local classifieds with a great sense of urgency because of their daily structure. Because of their self-policing nature and low cost structures, some companies offer free online classified ads such as Craigslist, Lazycity, Classified.Ad and AdPost. Craigslist was one of the first online classified sites, and is currently one of the largest. There are also country-specific classified sites like Bechna.com in India or Gumtree from the UK. There are a number of agencies throughout the world that have made a business out of the classified advertising industry. For example Wide Area Classifieds has created a classified network where people can place ads in papers across the US.

In 2003, the market for classified ads in the United States was $15.9 billion (newspapers), $14.1 billion (online) according to market researcher Classified Intelligence. The worldwide market for classified ads in 2003 was estimated at over $100 billion.

As the online classified advertising sector develops, there is an increasing emphasis toward specialisation. Like search engines, classified websites are often vertical in nature with sites providing advertising platforms for niche markets of buyers of sellers.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

An advertising network (also called an online advertising network or ad network) is a collection of (often unrelated) online advertising inventory.

Online advertising inventory comes in many different forms. This inventory can be found on websites, in instant messaging applications, in adware, in e-mails, and on other sources. Some examples of advertising inventory include: banner ads, rich media, text links, and e-mails. (This is not an exhaustive list.)

Large publishers often sell only their remnant inventory through ad networks. While not commonly known, even among many large publishers remnant inventory can exceed 50% of total inventory, although this is not always the case. Typical numbers range from 10% to 60% of total inventory being remnant and sold through advertising networks.

Smaller publishers often sell all of their inventory through ad networks. One type of ad network, know as the blind network, is such that advertisers place ads, but do not know the exact places where their ads are being placed.

In most cases, ad networks deliver their content through the use of a central ad server.

Large ad networks include a mixture of search engines, media companies, and technology vendors.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Contextual advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites which ads are served by automated systems based on the content of the page.

Google AdSense was the first major contextual advertising program. It worked by providing webmasters with JavaScript code that, when inserted into web pages, called up relevant advertisements from the Google inventory of advertisers. The relevance was calculated by a separate Google bot that indexed the content of the page.

Since the advent of AdSense, the Yahoo Publisher Network, MSN adCenter and others have been gearing up to make similar offering.

Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites. As the ads are more targeted they are more likely to get clicked, thus generating revenue for the owner of the website (and the server of the advertisement). A large part of Google’s earnings are from their share of the contextual ads served on the millions of webpages running the Adsense program.

Links

• MSN Ad Center news article
• Contextual Advertising Sandbox Compare Ads served by Google Adsense, Chitika and Yahoo Publisher Network

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

AdWords is Google’s branded text-based pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service.

Google’s advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches Google’s search engine on www.google.com, ads for relevant words are shown as “sponsored link” on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results. The ordering of the paid listings depends on other advertisers’ bids (thus the system is classified as P4P) and the historical click-through rates of all ads shown for a given search.

All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google’s partner networks. The “search network” includes AOL search, Ask.com, and Netscape. Like www.google.com, these search engines show AdWords ads in response to user searches.

The “content network” shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. Google automatically determines the subject of the pages and displays ads for which the advertiser has specified an interest in that subject. The ads show in boxes resembling banner ads, with the designation “Ads By Gooooooooooogle.” These content network sites are those that use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model.

AdWords is used by publishers who wish to bring traffic to their websites. The biggest competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and MSN’s soon-to-be-launched adCenter.

Most of Google’s revenue comes from AdWords.

Legal context

The service has generated lawsuits in the area of trademark law and click fraud. [1]

Interacting with Adwords

The ads are displayed on the right hand side of the natural search results. The ads are pure text, and thus difficult to block. However, on external sites, they are hosted within an IFRAME (an HTML element), making them easy to remove with advertisement blockers.

Technology

The AdWords system was initially implemented on top of the MySQL database engine. After the system had been launched, management decided to use a commercial database (Oracle) instead. As is typical of applications simultaneously written and tuned for one database, and ported to another, the system became much slower, so eventually it was returned to MySQL ([2])

Links

• Official Website
• Program Details and FAQ
• Adwords Lawsuits
• Google AdWords API
• Google Advertising Professionals aka GAP’s
• WhoisaGAP Helps you find out who is a Google Advertising Professional

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A central ad server is a computer server that stores advertisements and delivers them to web site visitors. These servers centrally store the ads so that advertisers and publishers can track from one source the distribution of their online advertisements, and have one location for controlling the rotation and distribution of their advertisements across the web.

The central ad server was first developed and introduced by FocaLink Media Services in 1995 for controlling online advertising or banner ads. The company was founded by Dave Zinman and Jason Strober, and based in Palo Alto, CA. In 1998, the company changed its name to AdKnowledge, and was eventually purchased by CMGI in 1999.

Ad Server Functionality

The typical common functionality of ad servers includes:

• Uploading creative, including display advertisements and rich media
• Trafficking ads according to differing business rules
• Targeting ads to different users, or content
• Optimizing creative based on results
• Reporting impressions, clicks, post-click activities, and interaction metrics

Advanced functionality may include:

• Frequency capping creative so users only see messages a limited amount of time
• Sequencing creative so users see messages in a specific order (sometimes known as surround sessions
• Excluding competitive creative so users do not see competitors’ ads directly next to one another
• Displaying creatives so an advertiser can own 100% of the inventory on a page (sometimes known as roadblocks
• Targeting creatives to users based on their previous behavior (Behavioral marketing)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the web site or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns.

Two types of internet companies use ad serving: web sites and advertisers. The main purpose of using an ad server is different for both of them:

For a web site, the ad server needs to look through all the ads available to serve to a user who is on a page, and choose the one that will make the web site the most money, but still conform to the rules that the advertiser and web site have agreed. For example if a web site has 10 different advertisers that have paid for a big square ad, the ad server must decide which one to serve (or display). One advertiser may have only agreed to pay for ads from 9am – 5pm. If it is after 5pm, then the Ad Server must not serve that one. Another advertiser may only have paid to show one ad to each user per day. The ad server must therefore see if a user has seen that ad before, on that day and not serve it again if the user has seen it. Another advertiser may have agreed a high price, but only if the person watching the page is in the United States. In that case, the Ad Server needs to check the IP address to determine if the user is in the US and then decide which is the highest paying ad for that user, in the US, at that time, given what that user has seen in the past.

For an advertiser the ad server needs to try to serve the ad that is most likely to result in a sale of the product advertised. For example if a user is viewing a page, the advertiser’s ad server needs to decide from previous history, what ad that user is most likely to click on and then buy the product advertised. If the user is on a technology page, then the ad server may know that on technology types of pages, the ad that works best is a blue one with mostly text and pricing and numbers, not the green ad with a picture of a model and little text. The ad server will therefore serve this ad, to try and get the highest probability of a sale from the ad.

Ad Serving is most complex when it is used by an Advertising Network. An advertising network buys ads from many web sites and therefore acts like an advertiser user of Ad Serving. When the network buys ads, it tries to place ads on sites where they work best. However an ad network then sells its aggregated ad inventory to advertisers. When doing this, it uses its Ad Serving software as a web site does. In this case it tries to make the most money by only running the ads from advertisers that pay most.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Ad filtering or ad blocking is a service which removes or alters advertising content in a webpage. This content can be represented in a variety of ways including pictures, animations, text, or pop-up windows. More advanced filters allow fine-grained control of advertisements through features like blacklists, whitelists, and regular expression filters. Certain security features also have the effect of disabling some ads.

The immediate benefits include cleaner looking webpages free from advertisements and lower resource-usage (bandwidth, CPU, memory, etc.). One drawback is that advertisements are a major source of revenue for many websites. However, the actual loss of revenue, when present, is difficult to measure.

Browser integration

Some web browsers support ad filtering through built-in features and plugins. A number of popular browsers include a pop-up blocker, such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox , Opera Software’s Opera, and Apple Computer’s Safari. All of these browsers support extensions and/or plugins which can include ad filters. For example, Adblock is a popular extension for Firefox.

External programs

A number of external applications offer ad filtering as a primary or additional feature. A traditional solution is to customize an HTTP proxy (or web proxy) to filter content. Proxies may reside on and serve a single computer or serve a number of clients over a network. These programs work by caching and filtering content before it is displayed in a user’s browser. This provides an opportunity to remove not only ads, but content which may be offensive or inappropriate. Popular proxy software which can be used as effective ad filters include: Privoxy, Squid, Proximodo, and Proxomitron.

Common advertising techniques

• Pop-up ads
• Plain text
• Ad banners
• Flash animations
• Keyword hyperlinks (for example Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT[1])
• Browser plugins/extensions (often labeled as adware)
• External applications

Links

• An Adblock tool for Opera
• DoubleClick Warns Against Ad-Blocking Browsers
• JD’s proxomitron filterset

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Famous advertising agencies

BBDO — works with Anheuser-Busch, Visa, and PepsiCo.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky –famous for Subservient Chicken, works with Burger King, EarthLink, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Volkswagen
Doyle Dane Bernbach — created famous campaigns for Volkswagen (including the famous “Lemon” ad) and Avis Rental Cars (“We’re number 2. We try harder.”)
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners — famous for the “Got Milk?” campaign, among others
JWT (formerly J. Walter. Thompson) — works with Kelloggs, Unilever, Diageo.
The Martin Agency — UPS, GEICO, NASCAR, Miller (Lite, MGD), Hanes, and others
N.W. Ayer & Son — the first ad agency in the United States, coined “When it rains it pours” (Morton Salt), “A diamond is forever” (De Beers), “Reach out and touch someone” (AT&T), “Be all you can be” (United States Army), and others
Ogilvy & Mather — famous for the Rolls-Royce print ad with the headline “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”, among other ads
Saatchi and Saatchi — most famous for working with the Conservative Party especially during the 1979 general election (Maurice and Charles Saatchi later left and set-up M&C Saatchi)
TBWA\Chiat\Day — works with Apple Computer (including the “Think Different” campaign) and adidas. Responsible for creating the fcuk brand and (in the UK) Wonderbra advertising.
Partnership Advertising — responsible for developing the “loading cancer” ad that won the 2003 New York Festivals Finalists

Largest Advertising Groups

According to the Research Company Evaluating the Media Agency Industry, the 2004 top 6 largest advertising groups ranked by worldwide billings were the following:

WPP Group: $48.055 Billion
Publicis: $34.365 Billion
Interpublic: $27.870 Billion
Omnicom Group: $25.230 Billion
Aegis Group: $20.355 Billion
Havas: $8.775 Billion