News & Press Releases
Peer39 ensures web advertisers proper placement
By David Halevi
Last year, there were about 14 trillion display ad impressions on the Internet – about five billion in the United States alone. That’s a lot of opportunity for error, says Andy Ellenthal, CEO of Israel’s Peer39.
“Advertisers want to make sure that ads for their product or service will be seen by potential customers, the ones most likely to buy – and to avoid having their ads show up at sites that are detrimental to their reputation. By using our semantic advertising solutions, both merchants and websites can be sure that their ads end up in the right place,” says Ellenthal.
While the reach of the Internet is far greater – and more cost effective – than that of “old media,” like television and newspapers, it’s also a much harder market to work with, let alone understand. While in a typical town there might be four or five commercial TV stations and maybe a dozen radio outlets, there are millions of websites, so picking sites to advertise on is an almost impossible task. That’s why ad networks exist – to steer a company’s display ad to an appropriate website.
But with so many sites to choose from, ad networks are bound to make mistakes once in awhile – with advertisers spending good money on ads that don’t pay off, because they’re hitting the wrong audience. Even worse, an ad can end up on a site whose tone and content is inappropriate for the product or service. For example, imagine if an ad for Spam (the canned meat, not the junk email) showed up on the site of a kosher certification agency.
Making sure ads end up on the right sites, and, perhaps even more importantly, making sure they don’t end up on the wrong sites, is Peer39′s mission, says Ellenthal. The company’s unique targeted semantic ad technology processes billions of web pages daily, filtering and classifying them, and then matching them up with advertisers in their network – both for inclusion and exclusion.
Growing from 30 million to 30 billion ads per month
The filtering system is extremely precise, Ellenthal says, and enables advertisers to zero in on their demographic, making sure the people who are going to see their display ad are the ones interested in what the advertiser is offering. Using natural language processing and machine learning, Peer39′s patented algorithms increase the value of online content by understanding meaning centers.
While there are several other companies in this business, none has the sophisticated tools that helped Peer39 win wide recognition. In 2008, Peer39 was named one of Ten Web Startups to Watch by MIT’s Technology Review, and in the same year it was chosen by the Silicon Valley venture organization AlwaysOn as one of the top 250 private technology companies in the world.
In 2009, Peer39 was again selected by AlwaysOn, this time for its 2009 OnMedia 100 List. And in 2010, Peer39 became a finalist for the Red Herring 100 North America Award.
Advertisers are just as impressed with Peer39′s work, says Ellenthal. Last year, the company was doing 30 million ad impressions a month, and by the end of 2011 Ellenthal expects that figure to reach up to 30 billion a month.
Peer39′s technology was developed at its R&D office in Petah Tikvah (the company has a sales center in New York), where some 30 people work on ensuring that ad space remains safe. Funded by US and Israeli venture capital funds – especially Evergreen Venture Capital – as well as by sales, Peer39 has been around since 2006, and Ellison, a veteran of a very young industry, admits that “things are vastly more complicated now than they were when I first started in this industry.”