Remember the name: Chitika eMinimalls

Many of you know about Google's contextual advertising network - AdSense. AdSense gives Google a way to grow its distribution outside of straight search, and to date no other ad format (with the notable exception of affiliate programs) has shown the ability to monetize traffic as well for so many websites/publishers. Yahoo is in beta with YPN (their competitive offering to AdSense), but while YPN is paying out at a higher rate than AdSense, they're very likely doing so at a major loss; CTR for YPN is 1/4 - 1/5th that of AdSense.

In my opinion, AdSense's real competition is going to come from a little startup no one's ever heard of - Chitika. They've developed a syndicated minimall (think comparison shopping engine) that targets its product display to site content in the same way AdSense does, but rather than display search ads, they display dynamically-generated product comparisons. A growing number of AdSense publishers have been trying Chitiki's eMinimall for several weeks now and are reporting 1.5-10X higher earnings than with AdSense.

I mention this to point out that
a) Google's competition is going to come from startups like Chitiki, and those startups will push Google to better monetize traffic
b) Yahoo's YPN is not yet showing itself capable of gaining marketshare in a profitable way
c) there is still much room for innovation in online advertising formats, as the below example from Chitika shows

http://www.chitika.com/mm_overview.php