MS&E 239Computational Advertising

Kalpana KumarLakshmi SaligramZia Ziauddin

The first banner ads were shown in 1993

It’s been 18 years and online advertising has grown tremendously; however the average CTR of banner ads today is only a measly 0.1%

The Problem: Banner Ads are ignored because they don’t show up when the consumer needs it the most

Advertising Landscape

The Question: How does one generate ad revenue

in a world where online consumers have adapted to ignore banner advertising?

The Solution:In-Content Advertising

Advertising Landscape

In-Content Advertising

This is called a “ContentLink”

So what is….

Kontera Facts

Kontera was founded in 2003 by co-founders Yoav Shaham, Assaf Henkin, and Henit Vitos

Kontera is based in San Francisco, with offices in New York City and Herzliya, Israel

Kontera ads are well represented on the internet and used in over 1% of the top 10,000 websites ranked by traffic.

Investors

The company is privately and funded by:

EXAMPLE

#1

EXAMPLE

#2

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#3

Business Model

Advertisers

Publishers

Kontera

Advertisements

Traffic

100 $ 70 $

Product

Kontera provides a service to create contextual in text advertising

Synapse engineData Engine- Semantic AnalysisEngagement EngineMonetization Engine

Extraction

Discovery

Classification

Clustering

Selection

Optimization

Story level targeting

Keyword vs Story level targeting

Key Differentiation

User intent prediction & relevanceHigher engagement for advertisersBetter ROI on ad spend Improves revenue for publishers

Kontera’s Publishers

1 •Over 55% U.S. Traffic

2 •High percentage of Search Engine Traffic

3 •Returning Visitors

4 •Cross-browser website compatibility

5 •Content Rich Sites

Five things Kontera’s top publishers have in common:

Key Competitors

Kontera

FastClick

Google AdSense

Vibrant Media

Infolinks

AdBrite

AdPapper

BannerBoxes

BlueFN

Bidvertiser

ClickcentMIVA

LinkShare

HyperBidder

Story so far…

July 2009: Announced significant injection of

growth capital by Sequoia Capital.

Dec 2010: Introduced Mobile Solutions for Context

Based Advertising

Plans for future growth

Future expansion into other regions, particularly Europe

Better semantic analysis and gain larger market share