Is Riotwise the start of real-time search engine marketing?

Real-time search engine company OneRiot claims to have launched a ‘real-time ad network’ that could monetise real-time search and offer a new form of PPC advertising.

Real-time search was one of the industry’s hot topics in 2009. Deals between the major search engine marketing providers and social media networks like Twitter and Facebook dominated discussion of future competition between Bing and Google. Both companies were seen as wanting to capitalise on the ability to incorporate up-to-date content and trending topics into their search capabilities, although many were uncertain how this could affect search engine marketing beyond increased appeal to users.

However, it is small rival OneRiot that appears to be leading the way in monetising real time search. The company, who operates its own real time search engine, has announced the launch of a “real-time ad network”: Riotwise.

“2009 witnessed an explosion of apps and services catering to users of the realtime web,” says Tobias Peggs, GM of OneRiot. “RiotWise is the way to monetise those apps in 2010. Our ads make sense to buyers, make sense to users, and transparently deliver revenue to developers across the realtime web ecosystem.”

Effectively, Riotwise identifies the trending topics in real time social media covered by the OneRiot engine and then begins to introduce sponsored content linked to those topics into the stream supplied to aggregators such as mobile apps and desktop applications. For example, if one of the topics is ‘Celebrity Big Brother’, adverts linking to fresh content about the topic are generated in real-time and introduced into the stream.

Riotwise’s ad platform could become a popular way of generating revenue from real-time search. Common consensus among the online SEO and SEM community is that Google’s real-time search has yet to add anything substantial to the search engine. Spamming the real time search feature with trended content has met with criticism as the anti-thesis of the targeted PPC advertising and SEO relevancy that Google is famous for. This new platform may offer a way to combine both real-time search and relevant advertising.