In-Text Advertising Company Lands $7 Million in Funding

July 6, 2006, Strategiy.com

Kontera, the leading provider of In-Text Advertising Solutions for web publishers and advertisers has secured a total of $7 million in their first round of funding from Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers.

Kontera´s flagship product, ContentLink is an In-Text ad unit, based on a patent pending real-time contextual analysis technology that finds relevant keywords on a publisher´s web page and automatically turns them into a link to the most relevant ad from among Kontera´s thousands of advertisers. ContentLink enables web publishers to monetize untapped and incremental ad revenue, while providing marketers with a better ROI than with other advertising vehicles.

With most online publishers serving banners, rich media and pay-per-click advertising, available real estate for serving additional ads is scarce. Meanwhile, the demand for online advertising inventory is increasing, forcing web publishers to turn away ad revenue and reduce their profit.
 
"After our analysis of the media sector, we became aware of two major industry trends - the inventory scarcity problem in online publishing and the explosive growth of user-generated content," said Thomas Banahan, Managing Director, Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. "We invested in Kontera because they have a proven service that offers online publishers an actionable and profitable solution to the problem of inventory scarcity. In addition, because Kontera´s content analysis technology works in real-time, it is the monetization solution for the burgeoning user-generated content market."

As the only In-Text Advertising technology which analyzes web content and serves contextually relevant keyword links in real-time, Kontera´s solution is uniquely positioned to generate revenue for publishers vis-a-vis the growing user-generated content market including forums, product reviews, blogs and social networking websites.

"As we´ve all seen, the success of search advertising stems from ´user intent´ - the user is clearly interested in the subject they´ve typed into the search box and you target to that. But beyond the user´s search activities, the best way to figure out the user´s intent is to analyze the content he or she is consuming. Ads can then be served outside of the text, in the form of text ads, banners, rich media or within the text, in the form of a ContentLink. The technology behind the ContentLink uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze the content in real-time, figure out the intent of the user on that page, and identify and serve immediately the best keyword-to-ad match available from within Kontera´s publisher & advertiser network. And not only is the ad mapped to the user´s immediate frame of mind, but it is also 100% user-initiated. They either mouse-over or not," stated Yoav Shaham, CEO and founder of Kontera. "This round of funding will aid Kontera as we grow and become the de facto In-Text Advertising Solution for online publishers, advertisers and users."