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Posts Tagged ‘Advertising Network’

Stickybits: Portal to Another Dimension or Graffiti for Nerds?

Seth Goldstein comes up with a lot of ideas. Some of them work and some of them don’t. He was one of the original backers of Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Etherpad (bought by Google) and Bit.ly (huge via Twitter). He was also President of the short-lived Attention Trust and built a browser plug-in that allowed people to track, manage and sell on the Chicago Board of Trade futures in their browsing history and other online attention data. That didn’t work out so well, though it was a very interesting idea. Two years ago he raised $10m, built an advertising network called SocialMedia.com and then sold it off in November.

Goldstein’s latest idea may be one of his most interesting yet. He’s leading a company called Stickybits. It’s a service that uses vinyl barcode stickers and a mobile scanning app to layer social media content on top of physical objects.

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You scan a Stickybits barcode that you place or find on some thing or some place (perhaps on someone) and you can see all the multimedia that’s been associated with that barcode before and add your own.

Erick Schonfeld covered Stickybits this morning on TechCrunch and called it a way to unlock “the secret lives of objects.” Commenters on that post brought up far more questions than Stickybits has answered so far.

Someone is going to nail this, though. I’ve long fantasized about being able to use my mobile phone while around town to find out the news, demographic and property ownership history of various locations. Stickybits isn’t doing anything that ambitious yet; it’s mostly just tweets, photos and audio messages. It’s hard to know if a temporary sticker from one particular company will be the way forward into a world of places and objects with social histories made easy to unlock.

Stickybits is selling packs of 20 attractive vinyl stickers for $10, a steep price if you ask me, but perhaps calculated to maximize the significance of each one and minimize the annoyance of property owners about to get annotated. How that price point and the need to download a free mobile app will impact the spread of the program remains to be seen. Whether the messages attached to the stickers end up looking more like Foursquare, Gowalla, Wikipedia or ChatRoulette is another one of the many questions that come to mind.

In a location-aware world, the primary role of the barcode stickers may simply be in letting people know that there is data associated with a particular location, something that other services that let you “tag your world” have struggled with. There will likely be other user experience subtleties, sublime and profane, that users start to notice after a few Stickybits scanning experiences.

Expect to find these things stuck around various places in Austin this weekend. Perhaps on cats, dogs, planes, trains, automobiles and street light poles all around the country soon. Will it work? We’d love to hear your thoughts in comments below.

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Google Patents Location-Based Advertising

It looks like while half the Web will be holding its breath over how Facebook will wield its newly-found patent power, with its patent of the news feed, the other half just found a reason to take a big gulp of air and look around. Google was awarded last Tuesday a patent for location-based advertising, the potential bread and butter of a number of emerging mobile applications.

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Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat first discovered the patent, which it says “covers using location for targeting, setting a minimum price bid for an ad, offering performance analytics, and modifying the content of an ad.” Google filed for the patent in April 2004, several years before location based check-in services ever came into popular use.

Now, companies like Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and BrightKite have to be wondering what this means for them, as do some of the established big-time players, like Facebook and Apple.

Cutler points out this could be a cause for concern or it could just be a bargaining chip, like in a cold war, writing “it’s uncertain whether other start-ups should be alarmed by this. It’s standard for companies to file patents on technology they have developed as a defensive practice, rather than as a tool for pressuring other companies to desist or pay license fees.”

The patent, titled “Determining and/or using location information in an ad system“, gives a fully detailed description of what we would expect of any advertising network, from the basic idea of serving an advertisement according to a user’s location to analyzing resultant traffic and advertising success according to a number of factors.

Google further expanded its bussiness in the direction of mobile advertising last November, when it bought the mobile advertising service AdMob for $750 million. We weren’t all that puzzled by the move then, but now it makes even more sense.

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91% Of iPhone Users Would Recommend Device Vs. 69% Of webOS Users: AdMob

AdMob, the mobile advertising network currently being acquired by Google, this morning featured the latest results of its monthly analysis of consumer usage and attitudes across the Android, iPhone and webOS application platforms in its January 2010 AdMob Mobile Metrics Report.

Among the most interesting things the survey found is the conclusion that 91 percent of iPhone users would recommend their device, compared to 84 percent of Android users and only 69 percent of webOS users.

That 22% difference has got to hurt for Palm.

Other than that, not much noteworthy in this month’s survey results, which states that consumers who use iPhone and Android devices showed “remarkably similar” activity levels, downloading approximately the same total number of applications and spending approximately the same amount of time using them. What I would deem logical and not remarkable at all.

AdMob further says iPhone users continue to download more paid applications, with 50 percent of users purchasing at least one paid application a month compared to 21 percent of Android users. The survey also included consumers on webOS devices and found that they downloaded fewer paid and free applications, although they remain active.

AdMob says it stores and analyzes handset and operator data from every ad request in a network of more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and iPhone, Android, and webOS applications. The AdMob share is calculated by the percentage of requests received from a particular handset; it is a measure of relative mobile Web and application usage and does not represent handset sales.

Additionally, AdMob claims that the number of ad requests to their network went up 32 percent between December and January, to a total of 15.2 billion ads.

(Image via TiPb)

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RGM Alliance quietly becomes a huge premium ad network on the web

Chances are you haven’t heard of RGM Group or its RGM Alliance division. But the company runs the Internet’s largest premium advertising network that reaches 67 million users each month. That’s more users than the combined audience of the web sites of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes.com, and Conde Naste Digital.

The Venice, Calif.-based company is announcing today that its RGM Alliance ad network has built a huge audience by serving premium ads from well-known brands into 158 vertically-focused web publications. Although it relies on ads for its business, the company has been profitable through the recession and its whole history. RGM thrives by getting advertisers such as Acura to create the ad on the right that runs on premium sites, such as Fashionista, throughout its network.

RGM competes with rivals such as Glam Media, which claims 52 million unique users in the U.S. and 88 million globally. Other rivals include Travel Ad Network and Conde Naste Digital.

Previously known as InterLuxe, the RGM Alliance has managed to grow during the recession, said 30-year-old chief executive and founder, Kamran Razavi. It did so by expanding beyond luxury advertisers (who advertised on RGM’s own JustLuxe site) to premium brands, which are well-known companies that reach a wider number of consumers than pure luxury brands. The company also vastly increased its number of partner publications which take the ads from RGM’s ad network.

“We have shifted our focus from working around luxury brands to those focused on building premium brands,” Razavi said.

Razavi, (pictured, right), who had an ad and marketing background, founded the company in October, 2004, at the age of 24. He poured the profits that came in almost immediately into expanding the company’s network. The velocity of expansion has accelerated dramatically during the past year.

In May, 2009, the company had just 21 million unique users per month among 66 publications that participated in its ad network. Now, the audience among the 158 publications has grown to 46 million users in the U.S. and 67 million users worldwide, according to market researcher comScore. The audience size is up 237 percent since September, growing mostly through the addition of new publications. During that time, ad rates have not fallen, in part because RGM targets its campaigns to get a good reaction.

The publications are sites that focus on high-value audiences. Among the well-known publishers are Elle, Frommers, the Los Angeles Times, New York Observer, and Car & Driver. The niche sites with growing audiences include Zimbio, Fashionista, and NileGuide. Its advertisers include luxury brands such as Jaguar, Cadillac, Waldorf Astoria, Bombardier, SkyJet, Debeers and others. But the advertisers also include premium brands such as Acura, HSBC, Bose, Qantas, Horchow, Arizona Tourism, and Bosch. In 2010, Razavi said more advertisers will come on board; today, for instance, Porsche is joining the network.

After RGM selects a publisher to include in the alliance, it categorizes the site’s content into groups such as travel, lifestyle, food and wine, fashion, home design & décor, business, automotive, real estate, and art & music. [Disclosure: VentureBeat is one of those 158 sites]. That’s a broader list of categories and it has been key to providing stable revenues for the company, Razavi said.

Razavi said the company stringently pre-screens web site publishers so that it works only with those that meet the standards required by premium advertisers in areas of brand integrity, site content, ad placements and audience. More than 2,500 campaigns have been executed to date.

Razavi says the alliance is transparent to both advertisers and publishers, with no hidden sites or traffic sources. Advertisers select a channel and can target their campaigns based on geography or desired behavioral categories. RGM’s beauty/fashion/style channel has more than 15 million monthly unique visitors, according to comScore.

The result is that ads placed in the network have higher CPMs (cost per mil, a measure of the ad rate charged per 1,000 visitors). The RGM Alliance is one of five divisions in RGM Group. Others include JustLuxe, a luxury web site; Razavi Global Media, which provides site-specific media representation and develops custom ad offerings for affluent-focused sites; Luxe Research, which provides research data for brands; and LuxeCreative, the creative arm of RGM which partners with ad agencies and corporate clients to create campaigns.

The company is self-funded and it has 25 employees.

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Video ad network BrightRoll outreaches Hulu, closes $10M third round

BrightRoll co-founder and CEO Tod Sacerdoti — pronounced “satch er DOH tee” if you don’t speak Italian — has three reasons to be happy this week. First, video advertising network BrightRoll is, according to Quantcast’s stats, now bigger than Hulu in terms of reach to Internet-using humans. BrightRoll’s ads reach 53.3 million unique viewers a month, compared to the Hulu Network’s 31.6 million. (The Hulu.com site draws 20.7 million.)

Second,BrightRoll has scored $10 million in Series C financing led by Scale Venture Partners, bringing the company’s total venture funding to $16 million since its launch in July 2006. Previous investors True Ventures, Adams Street Capital and KPG Ventures also participated in the round. Rob Theis, Managing Director with Scale Venture Partners, has joined BrightRoll’s board of directors.

Wait, there’s more! BrightRoll also announced today that it has been profitable for nearly the entire last 12 months. Rather than burning through it, the company will use this round of financing to expand its technology platform, beef up worldwide advertiser and publisher operations, and hopefully increase its leadership position in America.

Sacerdoti told me in a long phone call today that it’s not just BrightRoll, it’s video advertising as a whole that’s taking off. “The biggest theme we’ve seen over the past 12 months,” he said, “is that video advertising is being served for any free content, not just video content. Anywhere someone can serve a video ad, you’ll see a video ad. Video ads are going to be much more broad than TV will be.”

That bodes well for video ad networks like BrightRoll, as well as its competitors such as YuMe and Tremor Media. The thing about video ad networks is, as an Internet user, you’re not really aware of their existence. You just see lots of video ads all over the place, without being told who’s serving them. “It’s like when you watch Project Runway,” Sacerdoti said. “You know you’re watching Bravo, but you don’t think about whether or not it’s Bravo that sold the ads. Often it’s not.”

“I think by this time next year the majority of the top five to ten video properties by any measure will be aggregator networks,” he said. “The best example for this is display advertising. They’re by far the largest in reach and spending — Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and 10 ad networks make up the top fourteen. But what we’re seeing pretty clearly from the advertising community is that the preferred ad medium is video. All things considered, advertisers would almost always prefer to run a video to talk to their customers.”

Why is Scale putting $10 million into BrightRoll? “The online video ad market will grow to billions of dollars over the next few years by disrupting the $70 billion television ad market,” Theis said in a prepared statement. That’s three and a half times the size of Google’s annual ad revenue, and more than twice the total $30 billion online ad market. The most strategic Internet investments are those that compete not with other Internet businesses, but with the much larger amount of money still being spent offline.

[Photo: BusinessWeek]

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Glam Media On A Roll: Raises $50 Million In Private Equity At $750 Million Valuation

Glam Media, a vertical advertising network, has raised its fifth round of venture capital – $50 million from aeris CAPITAL, a Switzerland and Silicon Valley based private equity fund. The company is not disclosing the valuation of the round, but it is rumored to be around $750 million.

Glam’s last major funding was a $85 million combined debt and equity round in early 2008, two years ago, that valued the company at around $500 million.

$10 million – $15 million of this new round will be used to purchase stock from existing employees/founders as well as early venture investors. The rest of the round will be used for investment in the business and strategic acquisitions.

Profitable and Rolling

Glam is also announcing EBITDA profitability on North American operations and break-even results globally for Q4 2009. 2009 revenue was likely around $55 million, up from $40 million in 2008.

The company attracts nearly 160 million unique monthly worldwide visitors to the sites it controls and represents, putting it at no. 14 on Comscore’s top 100 worldwide Internet properties. Those visitors racked up over 2.5 billion page views and 2.5 billion minutes spent on the site. The network includes over 1,400 publishers and other content sites.

Glam attracts around 72 million montly U.S. visitors to its site, more than double competitor iVillage’s 33 million. The company, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley and New York City, is clearly gearing up for an IPO in the next 12 – 18 months.

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5 o’clock roundup: Attack downs e-commerce sites, Google hits FTC speed bumps and more

Here’s the latest action:

Blackberry Messenger to blame for service outage — Blackberry experienced delays and interruptions when trying to send or receive messages during a service-wide outage yesterday. Today, the phone’s parent company,Research in Motion, attributed the trouble to two recently-launched versions of Blackberry Messenger that turned out to be buggy. In response, the company is providing an even newer version, recommending that all users download it as soon as possible.

FTC puts Google’s AdMob buy under the microscope — Google has been asked for a second time to turn over documents related to its acquisition of the mobile advertising network to the Federal Trade Commission. This could be a sign that the deal is setting off antitrust alarm bells, but so far the search engine is playing it cool.

Nexus One may be invite only to start — Engadget reports that the Nexus One may be on sale by Jan. 5. But eager buyers shouldn’t get their hopes up. Apparently Google will only be handing out invitations for the phone to select individuals initially. It’s unclear how or when they will choose these customers, or when it will transition to general release. The article also lists some new specs on the handset.

DDoS attack strikes before Christmas, slows e-commerce giants — An attack targeting Neustar, the domain name service provider for web sites like Amazon, Expedia and Wal-Mart, took some of the biggest shopping sites on the internet down today, with just two days left before the big holiday. This is the second year in a row this has happened.

Barnes and Noble’s Nook beats expectations — After receiving lackluster reviews, the e-reader being offered through Barnes and Noble, called the Nook, will probably sell about 60,000 units in 2009, its inaugural year. While this is more than the company had anticipated — a generally good sign — it doesn’t seem so impressive when you compare it to the 400,000 Kindles sold by Amazon in its first year.

Indiana does its best to lure EV maker Th!nk – The County Council in Elkhart, Ind. voted to preliminarily approve a decade-long tax break for Norwegian electric vehicle maker, if the company agrees to build its new plant near Middlebury. But so far, Th!nk has named Oregon and Michigan as possible locales.

Is Solyndra set up to lose money? — Greentech Media breaks down the pre-IPO company’s financial model, revealing that it could continue to lose money if it doesn’t bring its manufacturing prices far enough below its current module pricetags.

Genetic testing co. 23andMe captures $27.8M — The company, co-founded by Anne Wojcicki (wife of Google founder Sergey Brin), brought in the sum in a second round of funding. It allows consumers to send in a sample of saliva to have their genomes read for predispositions to disease and other conditions — a concept backed by Google, Genentech, New Enterprise Associates and Mohr Davidow Ventures (which later sold its stake after throwing its weight behind competitor Navigenics).

San Francisco resurfaces cell phone-cancer concerns — The city is toying with the idea of requiring mobile retailers to warn consumers that their cellular phones could potentially cause cancer due to radiation. Despite past rulings that there is no connection between the two, a similar ordinance is being discussed in Maine as well.

Cc:Betty cleans up your mobile inbox — The application, used to thread and keep track of emails sent between groups of people for easy viewing, has just launched for the iPhone, allowing users to organize mail on their phone for simple access on the go.

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Branchr Advertising Launches New Ad Network, CPMForest

Today, Branchr Advertising is announcing a new ad network called CPMForest. The new network focuses on using a CPM model for billing, which the company has not offered until now.

CPMForest is designed to appeal to a very broad market: while websites with low traffic are often rejected from CPM based networks, CPMForest aims to remove this barrier allowing all sites onboard regardless of their size. CPMForest uses custom technology to analyze websites and display relevant, contextually targeted advertisements in a fraction of a second.

CPMForest is available beginning today in a limited release, but will officially open up the ad network in 2010 to all advertisers. CPMForest is currently taking on board medium-to-large scale advertisers and ad partners for its full launch. CPMForest’s CPM is regularly between $0.10 and $3.50.

In August Branchr Advertising acquired CRM tool Atomplan, which is running as its own product right now.

There are a lot of other options for CPM advertising solutions, including Adagency1, Adpepper, AdSmart, Adtegrity, Banner Connect and others, so CPMForest is jumping into a crowded market.

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