Online auction house eBay is about to enter the web advertising market space with a new context sensitive system for affiliate website publishers. The system will work in a similar fashion to Google AdSense, which recognises keywords on a web page and serves up ads linking to websites that are relevant to the content.
In a basic example of a context sensitive system, a web page containing an article about computers is likely to serve ads from computer manufacturers. The eBay system, called eBay AdContext, works in a similar way except that it will only serve up ads on partner sites which link to auctions on eBay.
While eBay reportedly insists the new eBay AdContext (notice the similarity in name to AdSense) is not in competition with Google, industry commentators note two things. Firstly, it's in the interests of both Google and eBay to be nice to each other because eBay is probably Google's biggest advertising customer, while eBay gets a huge proportion of its traffic from Google. Secondly, transforming eBay AdContext to a universal context-based advertising system for web publishers in direct competition to Google AdSense would be a piece of cake.
