AnchorFree and Improved Geotargeting

I spoke with AnchorFree this morning about their hotspot ad network. The company says its current footprint represents:

• 10,000 locations
• 400,000,000 page views per month
• 5,400,000 user sessions per month

Primarily at hotels, airports and cafes, the company serves banner ads that can be demographically, contextually and locally targeted. Peter Krasilovsky has some additional detail.

The company is something of a middleware provider that serves ads but doesn’t offer the access itself. Accordingly, one of the big challenges that we discussed was getting the existing providers of wireless Internet access to change their model and either reduce fees or eliminate them. AnchorFree EVP Mark Smith said that consumer usage goes way up when the service is free, which makes sense of course.

Right now the company works with existing ad networks like Specific Media and Yahoo! to provide banners. Geotargeted ads come mostly from national entities with local stores.

Beyond this what’s interesting is that AnchorFree’s geotargeting capability, because it’s WiFi, is down to the address. Reverse IP technology varies in its accuracy but doesn’t offer that kind of precision. Mobile is the other arena in which highly accurate location targeting is available (for example, Google’s My Location service).

This is one of the themes in local for 2008: greatly improved location awareness and targeting.