PINFO » The Network

Revenue Science Starts Behavioral Network

Revenue Science said it has formed a new ad network that targets ads based on user behavior across several sites.

The network is meant to address a shortcoming of behavioral targeting: the inability to build large enough segments when only collecting user behavior on a single site. Revenue Science's network allows advertisers to deliver brand advertising to audiences formed by data pooled by participating sites. Revenue Science did not announce which of the sites that use its software, which include WSJ.com, FT.com and Reuters.com, would participate.

Continue to Adweek

Digital Impact Board Nixes InfoUSA Offer

The board of directors at Digital Impact recommended shareholders decline InfoUSA's unsolicited offer to buy the company for about $71 million, saying the price was too low.

InfoUSA, an Omaha, Neb.-based database company, last month offered to pay $2 in cash for the 35.3 million outstanding shares of the Internet marketing agency. At the time, the price was a 38 percent premium on Digital Impact's stock price. Since then, Digital Impact's share price has risen to $1.99.

Digital Impact's board said it concluded the company could build more value by continuing its plan to expand the San Mateo, Calif., firm beyond primarily e-mail marketing services. It bought search-marketing provider Marketleap in July 2004 for $3.8 million.

Campaigns are eligible that use at least three distinct communication channels, including both traditional and non-traditional media. There is no limit in terms of the number of communication channels used and the length of the execution.

"We believe that continued execution of our business plan will enable us to deliver value to our stockholders in excess of InfoUSA's offer," Digital Impact CEO William Park said in a statement.

Credit Suisse First Boston, hired by Digital Impact to evaluate the offer, reported to the board that the offer was "inadequate" financially, Digital Impact said. In January, Digital Impact reported third-quarter revenue of $11.1 million and an $811,000 net loss.

To guard against a hostile takeover, Digital Impact said it would adopt a shareholder's rights plan. Under terms of the plan, Digital Impact shareholders gain the right to purchase one share for each share owned as of March 16, 2005. The provision kicks in if a third party gains control of 15 percent of Digital Impact's shares.

Tacoda Plans Behavioral-Targeted Ad Network

Tacoda Systems said it would stitch together an ad network of top-flight publishers that would allow brand advertisers to target specific audiences.

The network, called Tacoda Audience Networks, plans to target graphical ads to users based on their behavior on the sites of participating publishers. More than 2,700 Web sites use Tacoda's behavioral-targeting software. Tacoda said the network would eventually reach more than 85 million Internet users, although it did not disclose any publishers that have committed to participating.

According to background material circulated to ad agencies, TAN will offer ad targeting to 10 audiences, from auto buyers to job seekers to travelers. Tacoda will match data from participating sites to target the ads to users on other sites. For example, visits to a car site could be used to show a user an auto ad when on a weather site. Advertisers can use standard ad units and rich media.

Building a network could help Tacoda deal with the most persistent complaint about behavioral targeting: the inability to offer advertisers a large enough audience when confined to a single site.

TAN will complement Tacoda's Audience Match service, which displays direct-response text links on sites like USAToday.com. With the brand-focused network, Tacoda will seek to differentiate itself from the growing pack of ad networks that show ads on a wide variety of sites, which Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan claims puts advertisers at risk of having their brand appear in inappropriate placements.

"The environment in which their ads are placed are critical," he said in a statement, "and so is minimizing wasted impressions through behavioral targeting."

ValueClick's Q4 Sales, Profits Grow

ValueClick said its fourth-quarter revenue and income grew sharply from a year earlier, thanks to strong demand for performance-based Internet advertising.

The Westlake Village, Calif., company, which provides Internet media and technology services, said its fourth-quarter revenue was $54.4 million, an 80 percent improvement from a year earlier. Net income was $13.5 million, or 17 cents a share, more than double the year-ago period. Excluding revenue from acquired companies, ValueClick's business grew 49 percent.

"Media and affiliate marketing drove our growth," said James Zarley, ValueClick's CEO, on a conference call with analysts.

For the first quarter, ValueClick forecasts revenue of $48 million to $49 million and net income of 8 cents per share.

Zarley said 2004 was a "watershed year" for ValueClick's affiliate-marketing business, which it greatly expanded when it bought Commission Junction to complement its BeFree affiliate-marketing platform. ValueClick also acquired opt-in e-mail company Hi-Speed Media and European comparison-shopping search engine Pricerunner.com.

Zarley said ValueClick would enter the U.S. shopping-search market early in the second quarter. The company plans to expand its affiliate-marketing platform to additional European markets and possibly Asia.

Fastclick Ad Network Sales Boom

Fastclick said revenue from its Internet ad network doubled in 2004, thanks to robust demand for performance-based advertising.

Fastclick, which places targeted ads on Web sites, filed for an initial public offering in December 2004 that aims to raise $92 million. In September, it received $75 million in venture funding, $55 million of which was used to buy the shares controlled by the company's executives and their families.

In the fourth quarter, Fastclick reported revenue of $19 million, up from $10.2 million in fourth-quarter 2003. Net income was $1.5 million, down from $2.1 million in the year-ago period. Fastclick's cost of revenue, which is the amount it pays Web sites for their ad inventory, decreased as a percentage of revenue. In fourth-quarter 2003, cost of revenue was 67.1 percent of revenue, compared to 65 percent in the same period in 2004.

Fastclick said it placed 6.5 billion ads in December 2004 across more than 8,000 Web sites. According to ComScore Media Metric, Fastclick's ad network reached 115 million Internet users last month. The Fastclick network includes niche Web sites and inventory bought from portals like Yahoo.

Fastclick has invested in building new technology. It plans to release a search engine bid-management tool, based on its ad-optimization technology, in the next month. In its SEC filing, the company said it is working on technology that is "designed to gather, store and distribute to advertisers targeted Internet user contact and other information." That technology should be released in the second quarter, the company said.

Fastclick competes with ad networks like AOL's Advertising.com, Burst Media and ValueClick. In most cases, the networks buy ad inventory on an impression basis, then resell it to advertisers with performance pricing. Fastclick's uses optimization technology to better target its ads and generate clicks. Adware maker Claria announced this week that it planned to launch its own behaviorally targeted network in April that would buy $100 million of Web ad inventory in the following year.

TechTarget Buys Bitpipe for $40 Mil.

BOSTON Information technology media company TechTarget today said it has acquired Bitpipe, an online distributor of white papers, Webcasts and other services, in a $40 million cash deal. Both companies are privately held.

Bitpipe co-founder and CEO Jay Habegger has joined TechTarget as evp, media products.

TechTarget's acquisition of Bitpipe is designed to expands the company's reach among IT buyers and enhances TechTarget's ability to generate results for its advertisers, the company said.

The deal combines the market strengths of two fast-growing IT media companies "to create a powerhouse in IT publishing and advertising," said TechTarget CEO Greg Strakosch, in a statement. "Bitpipe has built a booming business and disrupted the IT media landscape by taking advantage of the enormous shift from traditional to online media."

"TechTarget can now offer IT marketers additional advertising products that take advantage of the broad reach enabled by Bitpipe's extensive distribution network and the access to targeted communities of IT buyers that TechTarget provides," Habegger said.

TechTarget is in Needham, Mass.; BitPipe is located in Boston.

Blog Heads Merriam-Webster Word List 2004

NEW YORK To the surprise of no one (here), "blog" heads the list of dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 most researched words on its Web sites for the year.

In case you wondered, Merriam-Webster Inc. defines blog as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks." Presumably, it defines "hyperlinks" elsewhere.

Eight entries on the top-10 list related to news events, ranging from "hurricane" and "cicada" to "incumbent" and "partisan" (but not flip-flop or bulge). No profanities are eligible.

A Merriam-Webster spokesman told Reuters that it was not possible to say how many times blog had been looked up on its Web sites but that from July onward, the word has received tens of thousands of hits per month.

Blog will be a new entry in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.

NYTimes.com Launches Technology Blog

NEW YORK As part of the relaunch of its technology section, NYTimes.com Thursday afternoon introduced a new Web log called "Pogue's Posts," written by Times technology reporter David Pogue.

"Welcome to Pogue's Posts, an experiment in daily blogging," he wrote in his first entry. "I'm the weekly Circuits columnist who reviews all things techie--computer stuff, personal electronics, cell phones, home theater gear, digital music and video--and be here each day with my musings on the state of consumer technology."

Pogue writes that he "plan[s] to use the space to answer reader questions, follow up on the other columns, flag emerging tech news issues, point out hilarious or important developments on the Web, share cool tips and write about other topics that don't justify a longer-form treatment."

Pogue writes a column to the weekly Circuits section in the print edition of the The New York Times, and already contributes a weekly e-mail column and a weekly video commentary for the site.

The blog is linked from the home page of the NYTimes.com Technology section.

Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience

Mark Hurst asks the question:

What if a company stopped advertising altogether and focused exclusively, with undivided laser-focus attention, on the customer experience? Would the CEO be insane? If it was a public company, would Wall Street riot, and would the board ask for the CEO's resignation?

In a word--nope. Just ask Jeff Bezos.

[from Good Experience]

More blog evangelizing

MarketingProfs today gives us Three Reasons to Publish an E-Newsletter AND a Blog.

Good stuff.

New thoughts on Permission Marketing

This PDF Report, titled 'You've Got News' is an interesting read in relation to the Network. Some interesting theories on rewarding folks for giving up more personal information. NEXTGEN should take note.

eUniverse becomes IntermixMedia--looking very Networkesque

The company formerly known as eUniverse (one of the publicly-traded web companies that I've NEVER fully understood--especially since The Chron seems bigger) has changed its name to IntermixMedia.

It is worth checking their new site out, to see how this company has re-branded for the new era of digital media. Lots to take away for the Network, in this case study.

The New Yorker on GOOGLEBOMBING

Important article on search engine optimization in the New Yorker of all places.

A must-read for The Network / Infosafe.

Google Releases Standards for Adware Manners

Taking a page from InfoSafe's book, Google has set forth a series of suggested principles for software makers to follow when writing programs that embed themselves on Internet users' PCs.

This move comes just days after Google delisted WhenU (a spyware distributor) for using cloaking tactics on Google-indexed sites.

Del Tacoda?

Tacoda Systems, a company that provides behavioral targeting services to Web publishers like iVillage and About, has added the Associated Press as a client.

The news organization will use Tacoda's software to track and identify specific audience segments and target advertising accordingly on its 400-plus Web sites.

One of New York-based Tacoda's chief competitors is Revenue Science of Bellevue, Wash., which works with properties like FT.com and Reuters.com to serve ads based on users' past actions.

The price for campaigns that use behavioral targeting fall between low-end run-of-site and premium page-specific ad efforts, publishers said.

Internet Marketing in Iraq

For the past few weeks, MarketingVOX has been volleying questions to Ali Yaqoub, marketing manager for Iraqi web portal Baghdad Bazaar. In that time the security situation in Baghdad has gone from better to worse to better, and through the shifts, Yaqoub has remained confident that his business-to-business portal can succeed and help in reconnecting Iraqis to the world and the development it promises. Among other topics, MarketingVOX asked him about the nature and culture of the businessmen who will be responsible for redevelopment, the infrastructure problems that pose challenges and the opportunity for web marketing to bring the unsettled economy to markets it cannot otherwise access.

[from MarketingVOX]

Consumer Privacy Education

In this morning's MediaPost, Tom Hespos is calling for consumer privacy education. The thrust of his argument is basically this:

What's clear to me is that if we don't do something about this, and consumer fear leads to people making the wrong assumptions about how data is used by online marketers, we're going to be limited in terms of the targeting we'll be able to take advantage of. One of the things that consumers fail to realize is that non-PII data is commonly used to help deliver ads that are more relevant. If they take steps to appear invisible to online marketers, they'll simply get a lot more advertising that is irrelevant to them. Who wants to return to the days when untargeted pop-ups dominated the online advertising scene? Not me. I suspect consumers wouldn't want to see this either.

P.R. Business in Big Slump? Wait, didn't Kyle just say....

So on Friday I ranted about how blogs will help kill P.R.

And today we get this news: PR Biz in Big Slump.

I hate to say I told you so, but well....I kind of did.

[via Marketing VOX]

Blogs as PR? Didn't Kyle say that months ago?

Poynter's got an article linking to Steve Rubel's new blog, Micropersuasion, which focuses on "how weblogs and participatory journalism are changing the practice of public relations."

I've been saying pretty much the same thing for the past few months, especially as I've gotten more and more involved with blogs; only, I would take it a step further--I think in many ways the blog concept (though not necessarily blogs, as we know them today) will completely replace P.R. Or, I should say, an active blogosphere will make the job of the average P.R. hack far more difficult. Yes, there will be attempts to exploit the blogosphere, but it is a massive, organic machine, and it is driven by (human) nature to rout around bullshit and mistruths. And let's face facts, a lot of P.R. is pretty much B.S. and mistruths and "spinning" one thing to seem another. One could almost argue that blogs have risen in popularity DUE TO the rise in, and increasing invasiveness and inescapability of P.R. in today's media culture.

By the way, I am actually working on assembling ideas along these lines for a book. So please email anything along the blogs/P.R. front to me.

Interesting NETWORK-type Site

Phil Kaplan of FuckedCompany put this site out a year or so ago. I hadn't really looked at it until now, but it is very Networkesque, and definitely deserves a look.

Visit Phillip Kaplan's Bizient.com today.

UPDATE: Blogs making Ka-Ching

The Wiki has moved....GO HERE TO READ ABOUT HOW TO MAKE $$$ FROM BLOGS.

Awesome stuff for The Network.