Applied Semantics is expected today to launch AdSense, a contextually-targeted pay-for-performance advertising solution. According to Applied Semantics, AdSense generates advertisements comprised of “conceptually relevant search terms” and pay-for-performance search results targeted to real-time Web content viewed by an online user.
AdSense matches a Web page with advertisements from 20,000 highly targeted ad categories. Applied Semantics said AdSense has the ability to find a targeted ad enabling publishers to sell 100 percent of their inventory and noted a recent pilot program in which AdSense was displayed on more than 200,000 news page views over a two-week period, and managed to deliver an average click-through rate of 8 percent.
AdSense is powered by Applied Semantics’ patented CIRCA technology, a semantic engine that understands and extracts the key concepts on any web page. The foundation of CIRCA rests on the use of an ontology, or database of millions of concepts and relationships between concepts. CIRCA lets AdSense match the key concepts on a web page with the most relevant advertiser in real-time. AdSense crawls web pages, determines key meanings represented on the pages and selects the most effective pay-for-performance search terms. For example, a web page containing a news story on Tiger Woods and the Ryder Cup returns search terms and advertisements for golf tournaments, golf clubs and golf swings.
Applied Semantics, Los Angeles, is currently running several pilot programs with several online publishers and portals. It hopes to have one to two major deals closed by the end of this year.
