ContextWeb is launching in-text advertising for its publishers to add as an option to their pages. See the image below. Essentially as you may have seen, it takes the content of a page and looks for keywords and then marks those keywords with a double-underline or some other “link-like” device that launches a popup window full of ads.

As a user, I really dislike these types of ads and I don’t think it unfair to call them “site spam”.

It’s certainly fair, however, for a publisher to make a decision whether or not to add these to their site based on their need for monetization and the real or perceived impact on their user’s satisfaction of the site. Just as popunders are a (still quite profitable) choice that many publishers still choose to make, the use of annoying ad formats will only continue as technology vendors clamor to offer these based on continuing advertiser demand for these formats. No doubt interruptive or distracting formats do often work in the short-term. I have yet to see a lot of research on the longer-term customer impact for a site and for many it may not matter if what they provide is compelling enough, or if they are a domainer or arb site that is essentially just a waypoint for traffic, and it’s definitely hard to do this kind of research.

We meet with a lot of companies offering new ad formats, and since we’re in the business of driving performance for advertisers, so we certainly test our fair share of them. We do not, however, tolerate or work with companies that install adware or spyware without the user’s consent, or make it difficult for them to remove such software if legally/consensually installed.

Our questions are usually around: is it operationally efficient for us to try this format (a hurdle that is often hard to meet), does it improve performance for the advertiser, can they leverage existing assets and learnings to utilize it and improve on it, and does it enhance or harm the advertiser’s long-term consumer image and lifetime customer value. Alas, we do not seek to answer that question for publishers…