Phorm jumps after Turkey trial

Shares Phorm, a company which delivers targeted advertising based on the websites that users visit, rose after initial trials in Turkey showed it can now use ISP data to profitably show targeted text advertising without using a search engine.

The group, which works by scanning keywords on websites visited in order to build a picture of a customer's interests, said: "Text advertising accounts for more than half of the global advertising market and is dominated by search since search has been the primary method of associating someone with a keyword level interest."

A text advert typically includes a link to a website and a description or promotion of their product or service.

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Phorm said although there are ways of showing text advertising on third party websites, results have been mixed since the content of any one website is not always a strong indicator of a consumer's interest.

The group, along with its ISP partners, said it is, "uniquely positioned to identify repeated, keyword level behaviour and bring revenue from targeted text advertising within reach of most pages on the internet by showing a different text advertisement to each person visiting that web page based up on repeated keyword level interest prior to visiting that site."

The company also said it believes that, as it continues to deploy across Turkish ISP users and websites and builds scale over the coming weeks, it will be able to diversify the range of options available to text advertisers in the online advertising market.

Phorm CEO Kent Ertugrul commented: "This is truly a major milestone in the development of the business. Text advertising represents over half of the $90bn global advertising market and today, for the first time, we have demonstrated that there is a viable alternative delivery model based on our partnership with ISPs."

"We are very excited about the prospects of our business in Turkey and are now focused on using the excellent initial results to build revenue aggressively."

CJ