Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In the face of estimates that $112 billion of $300 billion is wasted on advertising that doesn't work, it's not surprising that there's growing interest among publishers and brands in technology solutions that deliver more bucks for the bang. Semantic advertising startup Peer39 - one of MIT's 2008 web start-ups to watch - is packaging some new technology into its platform that it thinks will help advance that mission.

Replacing the reports that previously delivered data about content and advertising is a real (or near-real)-time dashboard. Publishers can more quickly and transparently gain semantic insight into such data as their content inventories and the number of valuable categories represented in those inventories (as well as the less high-yielding content categories), to deliver the best matches between ads and content categories.

In addition to high-level data, users can quickly drill down into more granular detail, such as projecting the amount of content that will be created for a given category to help in making predictions about revenue for a particular ad campaign. Peer39's brand protection features are also represented in the dashboard, so that content categories can be added or blocked according to advertisers' requirements. Sales teams have access to post-campaign reporting functions, which break down campaign results by conversions, clicks and volume, Peer39 also says.

The combination of the economy and general contraction within the industry is helping Peer39 gain traction, says chief marketing officer James Oppenheim.

"But on the other side money is pouring into the Internet and advertising. Publishers are looking for innovative ways to create more out of their investment in content," he says.

While Peer39 isn't disclosing information about the number of customers on the publishing or brand front it has so far accumulated, it does count among its clients large content providers including Newsweek. News tends to be a particularly tricky bit of content to monetize, Oppenheim says, but Peer39 can help publishers of such content address that by categorizing lower CPM (cost per thousand) content into higher-performing categories. Because Peer39 can understand a page as a whole, including the correlation between keywords and sentences, it can recognize opportunities to re-categorize certain news pieces-say, about the economy-into new semantic business categories that better match to advertising content.

"Publishers for the first time they can generate income from very difficult traffic to monetize," he says.

Peer39, which had an original $12 million in financing from Canaan Partners, JP Morgan and Dawntreader Ventures, this summer closed a $10.5 million round in Series C funding that added Evergreen Venture Partners, which led the round, to its list of investors. The funding is being used to accelerate business development and continue to beef up the technology. The opportunity is broad, Oppenheim says. "It's our particular vision that 5 years from now every RFP coming through an agency will insist on semantic targeting," he says.

As further evidence that the publishing sector is putting more of a stake in semantics as it relates to advertising, last week Forbes sealed a deal with BeliefNetworks to deliver semantically relevant ad recommendations. Perhaps that's one way it's addressing a problem its outgoing CEO Jim Spanfeller identified in an article he wrote blasting the practice of liquidating unsold remnant inventory using horizontal ad networks that result in generating inconsequential revenue. Further, "in buying into the notion of remnant, publishers have vastly reduced their pricing power," he wrote.

Enabling its own sales team to create better content-ad matches could reduce publishers' reliance on third parties. In a press releasing on the BeliefNetworks' deal, Forbes.com senior VP and general manager Michael Smith said he expects the technology will let Forbes "leverage the high quality original content our audience has come to depend on with highly relevant advertising and breaking news and trends from across the web, blogs and Twitter."