With AdMomentum, Fast is betting websites will be increasingly interested in developing their own ad systems so they can bypass the search giants, which are making billions in the lucrative revenue-sharing search biz.
Annual spending on keyword ads is expected to top $10 billion in 2010, up from $6.8 billion last year, based on estimates from eMarketer.
“Publishers are not going to want another hand in their pockets every time they are selling ads,” said Perry Solomon, Fast's vice president of strategic market development, who declined to discuss AdMomentum's pricing model.
With the new system, AdMomentum faces an uphill battle in a market dominated by some of the world's most influential technology companies.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google is the most imposing: It has generated $20 billion from online ads during the past three years. The company shared $6.7 billion of that amount with its advertising partners.
Several years ago, Fast developed another challenge to the search giants but that effort flopped. That project, called AlltheWeb.com, never was a commercial success.
Fast ended up selling AlltheWeb and several other affiliates in 2003 for $100 million to a company that was eventually bought by Yahoo, which uses it exclusively as a testing ground for Yahoo's alternative approaches to search.
