Ebay To Serve Up Contextual Ads

Everyone’s favorite auction site is all set to enter the online advertising market. eBay Inc. will unveil a keyword advertising system for eBay sellers to promote auctions on other Web sites. Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s chief strategy officer, who confirmed this over the weekend spoke of plans to allow eBay’s members and auctioneers to run contextual ads on other Web sites in exchange for a cut of the resulting eBay sales. EBay’s system is vastly different from existing pay-per-click advertising systems offered by Google and rivals Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. It links only to eBay auctions rather than serving up generic ads. A test of the program, dubbed eBay AdContext, is set to be introduced early this week. What goods appear in any particular advertisement will be determined by the keywords on that Web page. This technique is known as contextual advertising. EBay’s system scans the text of a Web site for keywords and returns links to relevant eBay sales listings to the Web page.