AOL eyes more revenue from search ads

AOL plans to introduce a service on Monday to sell ads that will appear next to its search results, which are powered by Google’s Internet search engine.

AOL plans to introduce a service on Monday to sell ads that will appear next to its search results, which are powered by Google’s Internet search engine.

The service, called AOL Search Marketplace, was contemplated as part of a December 2005 deal between the companies in which Google paid $1 billion for a 5 per cent stake in AOL, a unit of Time Warner.

Until now, Google has been selling all the ads displayed alongside searches made on AOL’s sites. With the new service, some portion of those ads will be sold by AOL, fed into Google’s advertising system and displayed next to the search results viewed by AOL users.

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AOL said the service would allow marketers to target its users and deliver ads that are more relevant to them. With the new service, AOL said that it would also become more attractive to marketers that already buy display ads and other online ads from AOL.

“We’ve been missing the ability to match search advertising and display advertising campaigns,” said Michael J. Kelly, president of AOL Media Networks. “In a world where advertising market share is increasingly important this gives us an opportunity to tap into budgets that we couldn’t tap.”

–MIGUEL HELFT