Guruji.com ventures into online advertising

The Internet search firm has launched an ad-network named AdGuru and it has already roped in more than 100 advertisers, including HUL, ICICI Lombard, Gillette and Ebay

Bengaluru based Internet search firm Guruji.com is the next entrant into the online advertising network space, which is already dominated by players such as Komli Media, Tyroo, Ad Magnet, Ozone Media, Ad Chakra, NetworkPlay.in, .FoxNetworks and the recently launched DrivePM of Microsoft.

According to an industry estimate, online ad-networks in India contribute about 7-8 per cent to the total amount of display advertising market, which is worth Rs 400 crore.

The ad-network is called AdGuru and similar to other ad-networks, it will offer various display advertising solutions such as banner ads, flash-based ads, pop-up and pop-under ads to advertisers.

Apart from display advertising, it will also enable advertisers to run text-based ads, which the company claims is one of its USPs as most of the ad-networks don’t offer text-ads to advertisers.

In terms of ad placement, the ad-network offers search based and content based ad solutions. Under the search based option, ads will be displayed as sponsored links on the search results page of Guruji.com and on websites which have powered their search function through Guruji.com.

More than 400 websites such as ZeeNews.com, NDTV.com, DailyThanthi.com, Bhaskar.com of the Dainik Bhaskar Group and SantaBanta.com have partnered with Guruji.com to power the search function on their websites.

Guruji.com claims that it receives more than a million search requests daily and it believes that its presence as a search-engine will be an added advantage in the ad-network business.

Speaking to afaqs!, Anurag Dod, co-founder, Guruji.com, says, “We already crawl the web and as a result, we have a better understanding of online content and context. This can help us to target the online audience based on the context more precisely and efficiently.”

The company claims that it has already served about 1.5 billion ad impressions and more than 100 advertisers such as Hindustan Unilever, ICICI Lombard, Sharekhan.com, Bharatmatrimony.com and Ebay.in have started using the services of AdGuru.

The ad-network will also help publishers to monetise their websites by serving ads on their websites and its advertising services for publishers will be similar to Google AdSense. It will not directly represent the publishers and sell its ad-inventory. Instead, it will allow publishers to subscribe to the AdGuru service and start receiving ads, served by AdGuru, on their websites.

Publishers can either subscribe to AdGuru services on their own or partner with Guruji.com to enable ad-serving on the portals. Auto subscription through AdGuru will be similar to Google AdSense, in which the portal owner has to pick up a software code available on the AdGuru site and paste it on his website.

Publishers can opt for cost per thousand ad impressions (CPM), cost per click (CPC), cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA) based advertising deals. The company claims that more than 1,000 publishers are already using the services of AdGuru.

In terms of targeting, the ad-network is offering contextual and geographical targeting options. Ads will be served on the search results pages and across various websites and publishers using its services, based on the context of content searched, or get published on the website, or on the basis of the location of the website users. It will function like a blind ad-network, which implies that advertisers will not be aware of the websites on which their ads will be displayed.