AdBrite, the "Internet's Ad Marketplace," has laid off 40 percent of its workforce in an effort to be profitable. Two executives, its vice president of marketing, Paul Levine, and its vice president of finance, Bob Feller, were among those laid off.
"The layoffs are not a statement about performance, but about AdBrite controlling its own destiny and getting profitable immediately," AdBrite CEO Iggy Fanlo said in an interview. "And understanding the multi-decade phenomenon that we've found ourselves in economically, we felt there weren't other options."
"When an economic environment isn't strong, it's more prudent to tailor investment back, make choices more wisely, and self-fund," he said.
AdBrite, which won't need venture funding thanks to the layoffs, believes that profitability was just the first step in moving forward in an environment that's not necessarily conducive to high advertising revenue. According to Fanlo, AdBrite will focus all of its efforts going forward on a performance-based CPM model instead of its previous brand-based service. Fanlo claims that by switching his company to a performance-based model, it can enjoy a more highly-recurring revenue stream that should keep it profitable.
The company's history makes the news of its layoffs somewhat ironic. In 2003, AdBrite spun off from F***edCompany.com, which covered the layoffs and closings of start-ups during the Web bubble burst of 2000. F***edCompany's founder, Philip Kaplan, figured that there was more of an opportunity to grow by offering an automated advertising platform and decided to forgo his practice of discussing failed start-ups in minute detail and start AdBrite instead.
AdBrite currently serves 1.3 billion ad impressions each day on over 70,000 Web sites.
Originally reported on TechCrunch
Online advertising firm AdBrite is set to announce on Tuesday a new program to serve ads for third-party Facebook applications. Considering it a niche "channel" alongside existing AdBrite verticals, the company has launched a new Web-based interface so that Facebook application developers can join the program and make their inventories "instantly available to AdBrite's large base of advertisers."
The company saw it as a logical move, AdBrite co-founder Philip Kaplan said in an interview with CNET News.com. "We've just had a lot of Facebook applications signing up to use AdBrite," he said, stressing that AdBrite caters to a "long tail" demographic of many smaller advertisers and Web sites. It already powers the advertisements on Facebook Platform applications as hyped-up as iLike's music applications and as, well, viral as the "Zombies" and "Pirates" apps.
Currently, widget-focused advertising firms are limited to companies like the start-up SocialMedia, but that's about to change, considering the kind of buzz that social-network advertising, a nascent sector of the market, has been raking in. Facebook, after all, has rapidly impending plans to unveil a massive ad strategy. According to the terms of the newly announced deal with Microsoft, the Redmond, Wash.-based megalith holds the rights to all third-party ad sales on Facebook proper, but that leaves the developer application pages free for the taking--developers are responsible for their own advertising, and can keep all of the revenue. With its new Facebook app strategy, AdBrite is trying to exploit what it sees as a fairly open niche.
Some critics still say ads will never reach their full potential on social networks--we'll just have to see how it all unfolds.
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