New Overture service targets AdSense

The new service, labelled Content Match, will provide Overture's distribution partners with ads linked to the content on any given web page. MSN, which has worked with Overture for five years, is among the first to adopt the new technology.

The contextual advertising service will enable distribution partners to increase revenues, while offering advertisers the chance to promote their products and services to highly targeted consumers.

The nature of the product is such that consumers will only see links relevant to the web page that they are viewing, so Content Match represents advertising in its most unobtrusive form.

Web publishers - those companies Overture counts among its distribution partners - can place the advertisements as embedded links, positioned either on the bottom or side of their web pages.

The service mirrors Google's AdSense, which was unveiled a fortnight ago to "improve the overall web user experience by bringing relevant, unobtrusive, text ads to web pages rather than disruptive, unrelated ads such as pop-ups and animations".

It also mirrors a deal struck with Guardian Unlimited recently by Overture UK that provided the publisher with sponsored links associated with its articles. The deal focused on the Guardian's travel content.

Overture said contextual advertising represented "a significant growth opportunity" and expects the market to grow in size to be worth $2bn by 2008.

The company, with 88,000 advertising clients, will roll-out Content Match in the US, Europe and the Far East.

Seperately, Overture announced a deal with Loot to provide the classified listings site with paid placement search results.

19 June 2003:

21 February 2003:

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