Fast Releases White Label Adsense/Adwords

fastlogo.pngNorwegian enterprise search provider, Fast, released its AdMomentum product today. The new product is private-label contextual advertising platform similar to Google’s Adsense and Adwords platforms paid for by a software licensing fee instead of a revenue split. The product is aimed at high traffic sites taking part in the $6.7 billion search advertising market (PDF download). The product was born out of market research and their WebAds and Platefood Performance products.

AdMomentum provides publishers with a GUI to manage their site’s ad zones from purchase to delivery with tracking analytics. The system supports a variety of familiar advertising models that can be applied to the different ad zones: keyword auction, CPM, CPC, CPA, and flat rates. Ad zones can host ads based contextually on user input and page content in various formats such as videos, banners, and text links on the web and optimized mobile sites. Context can be determined based on keywords, geography, content, and a users click stream data. Having your own ad system also allows for finer grained tweaks to the system, such as how often the ad bot crawls pages to determine the advertising context. Australian search engine Sensis and US local search engine Local.com have been trialling the product for a while now. The sites have been selling ad inventory through their own marketing departments and through branded self-serve platforms. Sensis’ Bidsmart ad market allows anyone to bid on keywords or buy spaces in ad zones which can then be placed in an approval queue.

Fast’s AdMomentum fits in a niche between contextual ad networks like Quigo, Miva, and DoubleClick and third party advertising engines like those offered by Google, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and MSN adcenter. Dylan Fuller, a Senior Director of Product at Fast told me sites with as many as 5 million impressions a day have turned a profit on the platform. ContextWeb is another end-to-end solution in this space, but only supports text link ads.

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim is skeptical about AdMomentum. Rob Hof believes publishers will welcome the change.