Content Network Hopes Semantic Web Provides Edge With Advertisers

By SemanticWeb.com on September 9, 2009 3:33 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Publishers-online and real world-always have counted on the advertising community for bringing in the big bucks. In a rough economy, it’s doubly important to be the content network that wins advertisers’ hearts and minds, and semantic web technologies may give some online providers an edge over competitors.

At Associated Content, a four-year-old open-content network that puts some 1,000 to 1,500 new text-based assets on its site every day, a main goal is to help advertisers reach their marketing objectives by granularly matching appropriate editorial content against advertising messages. In July the site registered more than 9 million unique visitors.

“They [advertisers] know we can connect them with the relevant consumers coming to the site primarily through search,” says Kirsten Kahn, vice president of content and community.

To achieve its goal, it’s important for Associated Content to be able to easily, quickly, and on a massive scale identify the editorial materials that are the best fits with advertisers’ campaigns. There’s plenty of content to draw from – it counts some 800,000 editorial text assets in its catalogue to date.

But relying on keyword searches of its library alone to facilitate those matches doesn’t necessarily help identify enough materials. For instance, it’s easy and obvious to match parenting-category related content such as “newborn” and “third trimester pregnancies” to a diaper manufacturer’s ad campaign. But there are opportunities to automate the process of going deeper into its library to avoid missing related and less obvious content – such as an opinion piece on home birthing.

To better identify content

So Associated Content is in the beginning stages of implementing the OpenCalais semantic web service. So far the service has created more than a quarter-million topics in Associated Content’s editorial library, which can lead to some very fine-grained automated matches. Within three weeks of delivering OpenCalais its assets, the content came back tagged and is now being mapped to the internal taxonomy the content network has itself been building out over the past year. OpenCalais also is crawling new content every day to continue to add to that base.

“We’re starting to use the information to better identify content,” says Kahn. “Using this we’ll probably identify two times the amount of content [to connect with advertisers' campaigns] than we are right now because it’s such an easy way of doing it.” Equally important, OpenCalais does the work of ensuring proposed editorial matches are legitimate.

From the editorial angle, Kahn also sees the service as helping Associated Content get the data it needs to alert the hundreds of thousands of writers who contribute to its site of opportunities to provide content in areas where it should beef up its assets. Sometimes it might be driving that content production to help in an advertising deal or just to hone in on a topic that is really popular and picking up eyeballs – weddings, for instance.

“Using the wedding example, if I know we have 150 articles on wedding dresses and we want to build a wedding channel, I can look at what are some other related topics, like bridesmaids’ gifts, where our taxonomy helps,” says Kahn. “Then we can drill down to see how much related content we have based on the OpenCalais information. It’s very important data because it helps us analyze what we have and from an editorial angle we can use that to see where there are holes and then fill them.”

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