AdMoolah News and Views

In February, there was buzz that Turn.com was going to launch an AdSense competitor. They are going to have an official launch tomorrow at the Web 2.0 conference.

An Adweek article discusses some of the details.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Turn in recent months has attracted $18 million in venture backing from Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures. Turn has about 1,000 advertisers in its system, which displays ads on approximately 30 sites.

1,000 advertisers seems like a pretty good size for a beta. Of course one of the keys to competing at the same level as Google is to have a lot more advertisers. Hopefully there will be enough buzz about them to get advertisers interested. There are some difference with AdSense that may be appealing:

Unlike Google, which charges advertisers on a per-click basis, Turn relies on a cost-per-action scheme.

and,

Turn has another key point of differentiation: It analyzes 60 factors to decide which ads to show users, weighing variables such as past behavior, publisher demographics, copy contents and brand quality.

These differences sound interesting enough to get advertisers to be interested.

Of course, it remains to be seen what the publisher side of things will look like. No word yet on if they will allow the same type of self-service system that ad networks like AdSense and YPN have. Hopefully we’ll have a good alternative very soon.

Found via: John Battelle’s SearchBlog