Raju Vegesna's Blog

This post came from some random thoughts on the advertising markets. If you have some time to waste, please read on…

Currently, we know that Google is the king in online advertising. There are predictions that the advertising market is going to grow drastically going forward, which I agree, and I think we are just getting started in the online advertising space. But the interesting fact is, there are not many noticeable players in the market apart from Google.

Google is the current king in online advertising market primarily on contextual textual ads. But then, there are many other forms of advertising where we need some innovation coming from new players in this market. Hopefully we’ll see some new players emerge in this market with some interesting ideas.

I think there are many forms of contextual online advertising that not are well explored at this point.

• Content based advertising (Google is doing a good job on this one)
• Person Based (Targeting individual – based on a person, his preferences, habits, interests, hobbies etc)
• Time Based
• Location Based
• …and more

The most powerful and more targeted form can be a combination of all of the above.

Google currently owns the content based advertising. But other forms remain fairly unexplored. I hope companies like Facebook, Spock etc will innovate more on people based ads. They have information about an individual, their social interests, relations etc. They can do a good job of targeting ads based on their interests. Scoble has some ideas on how Facebook can create targeted ads.

While there are different concepts/forms of advertising (content based, time based, person based etc), there are different means of delivering these ads (text, banners, videos etc). The delivery methods can be different but they benefit from underlying context. On top of it, they can be monetized by we can have viewer impressions, Pay Per Click etc.

Its been a while that we saw some innovation in the online advertising space. I hope we’ll see more interesting players and interesting trends in this space.