You have to wonder when two companies who both say they are emphatically not competing with each other seem to be explicitly entering each other’s fields. First, we hear the most reliable rumors yet that Google is setting up a system to rival eBay’s PayPal. Now, straight from eBay, we hear that the auction giant is entering the contextual ad business. What’s going on? Keep reading to find out.
The announcement was made at the recent eBay Developer’s Conference in Las Vegas by Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s chief strategy officer. The program is supposed to go into beta mode this month. It’s called AdContext, and if you want to try it out, you need to be an eBay affiliate and sign up for the program. As near as I can tell, though, you don’t need to have been an eBay affiliate for any particular length of time before applying for the AdContext plan.
The new program almost sounds boring on the face of it. Basically, certain code goes on the pages of your site that you want to display eBay ads. AdContext then uses proprietary eBay data and eBay’s keyword selection technology to match contextual eBay ads to the web pages in question. The ads are updated based on both eBay’s content, which changes daily, and the content on the web page displaying the ads. After all, if you’re engaging in good web practices, you’re keeping the content on your web site updated regularly; when that content changes, you’d want the ads you display to change with it, so you can keep monetizing that content effectively.
So far, it sounds very much like the kind of ad program that Google, Yahoo, MSN, or even Amazon runs. But looks can be deceiving. For one thing, eBay’s network isn’t generic; links go to eBay auctions. So if you own a web site for juggling enthusiasts (maybe you publish information on doing certain tricks, have forum pages, run juggling-related news and reviews, and so on), you can set yourself up to link to eBay auctions of juggling books and equipment. Or, more precisely, AdContext can do it for you automatically. The differences between eBay’s AdContext and Google’s AdSense run deeper than this, however, as I’ll show you in a moment.
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