What downturn? Akamai buys Acerno for $95 million

And they say the exits are closed. Acerno, a New York-based commerce analytics company, is getting acquired by Internet infrastucture provider Akamai for $95 million. (News release.)

Acerno gathers shopping behavior data from retail commerce sites and manufacturers to predict what consumers might want to buy in addition to the products they are looking at online. This information can be used to target advertising or product promotions on Web pages.

Akamai is adding Acerno to its "Insight for Publishers" service to enable its customers to create better-performing commerce pages targeted at consumers.

Akamai is clearly interested in expanding its services to Web publishers, locking its customers in to not just its current network optimization and asset management solutions, but now a collection of services that help customers generate more money per page view than they have previously.

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Time is up on all of us that have no revenue strategy. VC's and companies are still interested in making money, and if you can do that then you'll be ok. But those of us with the simple strategy of the "users now, and cross your fingers for revenue later" mentality will struggle.