Digital advertising network Tribal Fusion has formally launched its Australian operations this week and claims to have been running successful trial campaigns with advertisers for nearly twelve months.

Tribal Fusion director of business development for Australia Vicki Lyon said the network of affiliate sites can already reach some 40 percent of the local population.

"We want to reach people in niche environments and can offer targeted niches across areas like travel, technology, and sport," Lyon said, adding the targeting can then be broken down into 100 sub-channels.

"We can also break it down via demographics to target consumers in specific areas; for example, if advertisers want to target 18 to 35-year-old females with beauty products. We also have a behavioural product to track surfing behaviours and patterns. By tracking search behaviour we can target in-context as opposed to out of context."

Tribal Fusion's network comprises mid-tier Web sites that fall outside the largest publishers. It operates as a revenue sharing model with publishers getting 55 percent of the revenue.

The service should be transparent for existing creative and advertisers have information of where ads are being placed, which is dynamically updated. Advertisers log into the portal to get status reports.

Tribal Fusion has so far run about 50 pilot campaigns locally with some big technology names like Microsoft, Apple, and McAfee.

So far Lyon is the only local employee of the Exponential-owned company, but she expects to hire people as the business builds.

Visiting from California for the launch, Exponential director of research Maria Domoslawska said with all the English-speaking Web sites in its network Australia is a natural market for its expansion.

"We would like to enter here and build long-term relationships with advertisers and publishers," Domoslawska said. "We also do benchmarking studies across different industries to help advertisers to see how campaigns are working."

"We have platform for publishers to manage inventory and campaigns and our aim is to allow publishers to monetize their inventory as much as possible."

Tribal Fusion also anticipates growing the local online advertising market.