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Posts Tagged ‘Looksmart’

While you were tweeting, RSS fund quietly died

Yesterday, Twitter announced the hiring of FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo to be COO of Twitter. Costolo’s career path from one of the most prominent RSS companies to Twitter is being talked about as proof that “RSS is dead.”

peHub writer Dam Primack circled back to find out if there was any truth to the idea that Twitter’s replacing RSS by checking out what had become of RSS Investors, a company founded in 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose stated goals were to raise a $100 million fund and invest it in “news aggregation, blogs, new classes of search engines and data aggregation in the financial and medical industries.”

RSS Investors’ inaugural press release listed Jim Moore and John Palfrey from Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, plus GE Capital veterans Richard Fishman and Steve Smith, plus Tom Crowley from Ritchie Capital Management.

Ritchie put in $20 million, but the team was unable to collect enough investments to create the $100 million fund they’d announced. After investing in Edgeio, Attensa, and KnowHow, RSS investors had no more money to give to other startups.

Attensa, which makes a server for streaming data within companies, is still in business. But KnowHow shut down and Edgeio sold its assets in December 2007 to Looksmart and Vast.com.

After that, RSS Investors stalled. Palfrey told peHub, “We never officially dissolved the fund, but we stopped making investments and everyone’s moved on to other things.”

[Image: peHub]

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Sure, The U.S. Has A Lot Of Click Fraud, But At Least We’re Not Vietnam

When it comes to ad clicks, Anchor Intelligence says it has more data than anyone this side of Google and Yahoo. And so when they release a report for the first time outlining what they’re seeing in click fraud rates, it’s worth paying attention to. And the numbers are interesting.

This initial report spans the first 6 months of 2009. Clicks are broken down as “valid” or “invalid”, with “invalid” ones further broken down into “innocuous invalid” and “attempted click fraud”. That last classification is obviously the key one. Over those two quarters, Anchor Intelligence’s data indicates that click fraud has remained steady, increasing slightly in Q2 to 22.9%, up from 21.7% in Q1. Yes, it remains a problem.

But the real interesting data comes when you break down the click fraud rates by country, as the report does. While the U.S. is pretty bad with an attempted click fraud rate of just over 25%, that pales in comparison to Vietnam, which has an attempted click fraud rate approaching 50%. No other country is even close to them, as Canada is number 2 with a 27.7% attempted click fraud rate, and the U.S. is third.

And while the U.S. accounts for the majority of the clicks that Anchor Intelligence sees, it’s not like Vietnam is entirely insignificant on the list. Of the top 30 countries Anchor measures, Vietnam has the 6th most amount of click volume across the network.

Back in April, Anchor Intelligence announced that the search engine Ask became a client to try eliminate some of its click fraud. While the service is fairly secretive about who it works with, other Anchor clients include Technorati, LookSmart and Adbrite.

Find some of the key parts of the report below.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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