MarketWatch Taps Kanoodle for Contextual Listings

In a major client win for Kanoodle.com, the search player will provide its content-targeted sponsored links to MarketWatch.com .

Under the deal, the financial publisher will use Kanoodle’s contextual listings product, ContextTarget, to deliver ads on its MarketWatch and BigCharts Web properties.

MarketWatch is the first company to use ContextTarget, making today the product’s official launch. The publisher said it wanted to steer clear of a keyword-based solution for sponsored listings, which it feels is a less than ideal companion to its real-time business news content. Kanoodle’s model lets advertisers link their listings to categories, which publishers map their sites to. Both Google and Overture, the leaders in the search space, use technology to determine what ads match the content on pages.

“We believe that our editorial pages require a unique solution rather than an extension of a keyword search,” said Bill Bishop, EVP and general manager of MarketWatch.com.

MarketWatch.com is a former client of Sprinks, which was acquired by Google. Kanoodle last month hired three former Sprinks executives let go in the merger. The hires took place around the time the company secured a new round of venture capital funding.

The client win adds two prestigious sites to Kanoodle’s distribution network-at-large, which includes search and publisher properties like Dogpile, Metacrawler, WebCrawler, CNET, and Galaxy. More importantly, it means Kanoodle’s ContextTarget launches with immediate caché among financial industry advertisers.

“MarketWatch.com is the best partner to anchor our finance vertical,” said Lance Podell, president of Kanoodle.com’s content division. “Adding the quality and volume of their audience makes ContextTarget a ‘must buy’ for financial services advertisers.”