The ax has fallen at Federated Media Publishing, the online advertising company founded by former journalist John Battelle. Seven of the company's 90 employees were laid off Friday.
The layoffs, according to a company representative, were almost exclusively on the display-advertising side of the company. Federated also creates interactive marketing campaigns, and with the display ad downturn in full effect, that's where the company has chosen to focus. Federated doesn't plan to ignore display advertising, but hope to make several hires on the marketing side.
"Given our journalistic heritage, we don't want to bury the lede: Today FM is restructuring parts of our business, and as a result, we are saying goodbye to a small number of our employees," a post by Battelle on the company blog read. "Also as a result, we are adding several positions in strategic areas where we see growth in the coming year."
In April, Federated Media raised a $50 million investment round led by Oak Venture Partners. The company serves ads on many of the Web's most popular blogs, like Boing Boing and TechCrunch, but it's had some high-profile losses over the past few years. In 2007, the company lost its display ad contract for aggregator Digg to Microsoft (though it still handles sponsorships), and tech blog network GigaOM left Federated Media for IDG last year.
Things haven't been so hot over at blog search company Technorati ever since Google debuted its Google Blog Search tool. But the company has kept going, and on Wednesday announced that it has launched its ad platform in an alpha test, after acquiring start-up AdEngage to power it.
In June, Technorati launched "Technorati Media," an ad network that now has about 45 participating Web sites. With AdEngage, which uses the now-common "self-service" model, advertisers can buy ads in the Technorati Media network directly. The new network, the company says, will be called Technorati Engage.
"Our goal all along has been to open up something that works for everyone, and that is ideally suited to the 'long tail.' While the audiences here are smaller, the levels of engagement, influence and audience expertise are exponentially higher," said Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra in a release Wednesday. "It's also been an incredibly challenging space for advertisers to target and buy. With Technorati Engage, advertisers can very easily achieve the necessary levels of targeting and critical mass."
In the past two years, Technorati has made a number of small acquisitions, like news aggregator Personal Bee and the "online magazine" Blogcritics. AdEngage itself, which has been serving ads on participating sites since 2004, will continue to exist on its own as well.
Glam Media, that digital-ad company that keeps expanding beyond its original base of celebrity gossip and fashion, has launched a new section: Glam Luxury, targeting high-end brand enthusiasts and the ad dollars that love them.
At launch, the headlining advertiser is (you guessed it), Swarovski, the jewel manufacturer that spawned a zillion awful iPhone cases.
So far, there are 35 participating sites geared toward affluent audiences that have agreed to be part of Glam Luxury and run its ads in exchange for some perks, like syndication in a Glam e-newsletter and access to a revenue-sharing video platform. Among the third-party sites are BlackBook.com, Travels in Taste, and Luxique, as well as existing Glam participants such as Apartment Therapy and Refinery 29.
It might seem a little bit silly, even tasteless, to be launching a luxury brand ad network in the face of a serious economic crisis, but Glam's stance is that Glam Luxury should actually help. Pinpointing audiences still willing to splurge on jewelry, handbags, and vacations, the company said, will be financially efficient and ultimately help profits.
"Glam Luxury is more relevant for luxury marketers than ever before," Joe Lagani, Glam's vice president of brand sales, said in a release. "The words, images, and thoughts that surround a luxury brand must reflect the current times, with a speed and adaptability the high-end marketer requires. Glam Media provides marketers with the right audience, environment, and reach, and enough flexibility to change with marketplace dynamics."
But perhaps in a sign of economic belt tightening, Glam hasn't hired a new "editor" for Glam Luxury, as it has with new content areas launched in the recent past. Instead, Glam Living's editorial director, Erika Lenkert, will oversee Glam Luxury as well.
So far, the company has 135,000 embeddable objects and 64 million monthly consumers of its widgets, which live on blogs, social-networking sites, and other Web destinations. The most popular widgets are "The Fun Classic Super Mario Game In Flash," BabyTicker: The Baby Countdown Pregnancy Ticker," "Cyber-pet," "Bubbles," and "Idiot Test."
While Widgetbox claims 462 million widget views in a month across 500,000 discrete domains, the big numbers don't add up to a big business. The majority of Widgetbox views are happening on blogs, which led Widgetbox CEO Will Price to become more than a widget supplier.
This week, the company launched the Widgetbox Blog Network, which catalogs widgets in 29 verticals, such as Autos, Music, Sports and Politics. "It's a natural step in the process for us to move away from a pure technology story about widgets," Price said.
The Widgetbox network, which is starting with close to zero unique users per month, will primarily appeal to the long tail of bloggers who lack distribution. Participants include the network channel widget on their blog pages, and Widgetbox applies algorithms to determine which content gets pushed up to the top of the network categories. It publishes leaderboards listing the top contributors.
Widgetbox is launching an ad network, categorizing widgets into 29 content verticals.
"To date, widgets don't have the concept of a network effect. The more people who use them, the more utility is created for individual users. Given bloggers are one of our largest user sources, taking a blidget (RSS feeds turned into a widget) from a single source, and sharing it with the community, and showcasing it in the channel, and having leaderboard benefits bloggers, online content publishers, and advertisers," he added. "The new channels extend reach, drive traffic, improve brand awareness for bloggers."
The Widgetbox network also gives the company an improved business model. Currently, the majority of revenue comes from custom advertising campaigns for companies such as Intel, Wal-Mart Stores, and Apple. But the vast majority of Widgetbox inventory cannot be monetized, Price said.
The company is developing an ad network to take advantage of the categorization into verticals.
"We have 462 million widget views a month, but advertisers are not getting it. We want to target demographics and have a user story--64 million unique users broken into 29 vertical channels, each with 15 to 300 authors," Price explained. "We have to (determine a) domain, categorize them into channels, and understand ad treatments such as drop downs, pop-overs, peel-backs, and rotations, in a way that satisfies users, publishers, and advertisers. It's still early. There are no standard ad units or blueprints to follow, but we are trying to figure it out. The goal for the rest of the year is to answer questions and go into next year with some case studies."
BuzzLogic, a start-up that , has pushed its ad network out of beta to a full release.
The "Conversation Ad Network" debuted in beta mode in June and uses BuzzLogic's influence-tracking technology as a way to draw in both advertisers and bloggers. Advertisers are promised access to the most influential bloggers in their niches, and bloggers with that influence are offered more lucrative deals.
Prior to launching the ad network, BuzzLogic purchased ActiveWeave, manufacturer of browser plug-in BlogRovr, to shape it into a tool for clients. Then, during its beta period, the BuzzLogic network enticed bloggers to join by offering them guaranteed $2 CPM (clicks per thousand impressions) ad rates.
"We've seen a strong correlation between campaign effectiveness and the quality blogs our technology is able to surface since launching our targeting platform last year--now we're expanding our targeting approach to our own network of sites," BuzzLogic CEO Rob Crumpler said in a release. "In this fragmented media environment, it has become clear that a popular site isn't necessarily influential when it comes to niche subject areas. Many lesser-known blogs have the capability to deliver great advertising results, they're just not getting paid for it."
There are seemingly zillions of ad networks out there, but BuzzLogic's technology for niche influence targeting gives it a leg up. The company said that over 500 sites have already joined the network in its beta phase.
AOL has formally launched the third-party mobile-advertising division of its Platform-A ad-serving technology, the company said Monday. The division has sprung out of Third Screen Media, a mobile-ad start-up that AOL acquired last spring.
Third Screen Media runs its own mobile-ad network, but Monday's announcement is focused on a new technology that enables publishers to put their ads on multiple networks using a strategy that AOL calls "inventory partitioning." They can, in other words, use a Web interface to pick and choose what percentage of their available ads go on which networks.
Mobile advertising got a big boost upon the launch of the iPhone 3G, with entire ad networks and start-ups popping up around Apple's device--making it the hot new platform for both Web and third-party app development.
Platform-A's mobile-ad options extend from text and picture messages to mobile Web ads to video and downloadable applications.
When Glam Media raised $84.6 million in February, international expansion was on its radar, and now we're seeing the results: the women's-focused ad network announced on Tuesday that it has acquired Monetise, a London-based digital-ad sales start-up.
(Yes, that's British spelling.)
All Monetise employees will become part of Glam under the deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed.
"The acquisition of Monetise speeds our entry into the important U.K. display ad market," Glam Chairman and CEO Samir Arora said in a release. "Monetise has strong relationships with London advertising agencies and enables Glam to immediately increase its reach in the U.K. market." Additionally, some of Monetise's in-house technology will be worked into Glam's platform.
The 3-year-old Monetise, which specializes in entertainment advertising, serves display ads on sites such as Flixster, ArtistDirect and the U.K.'s TV Guide. Those sites will become part of Glam's U.K. Entertainment division; Monetise co-founder and CEO Joel Cymberg has been appointed Glam's publisher management and operations director, and co-founder and sales director Jon Walsh is now Glam's entertainment sales director.
In recent months, Glam has acquired fashion social network StyleMob, launched a revenue-sharing video platform, and become the subject of a quintessentially Silicon Valley hot-air debate over whether it had really gotten a billion-dollar acquisition offer.
Blog aggregation start-up Technorati will be launching an ad network later on Tuesday called "Technorati Media," TechCrunch reported. This marks a new direction for the company, which has heretofore focused on blog search and directories.
As TechCrunch commenters note, this is not exactly revolutionary. Ad networks are everywhere. What makes Technorati Media different from a Glam Media or Federated Media is apparently the fact that it'll advertise on "the little guys" as well as high-traffic blogs, promising a better deal than Google's ubiquitous AdSense (it's similar to what Six Apart is doing).
There is also a top-notch lineup of advertisers already on board, which reportedly include Twentieth Century Fox Film, Acura, Adobe Systems, Best Buy, Chevrolet, Honda Motor, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Nike, Paramount Pictures, SanDisk, Scion, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Toyota Motor, T-Mobile, Universal Pictures, Verizon, and Visa.
But bloggers have reason to be skeptical, and not just because there are so many ad networks already: Technorati just hasn't been doing a first-rate job in the performance department recently.
Compete.com shows an overall traffic decline since last year, with the exception of a major spike in November that has since subsided. CEO David Sifry stepped down in August, in a move accompanied by several layoffs.
The blog search niche has, meanwhile, been crowded with Google Blog Search--and for zeitgeist measurement tools, there are plenty of Twitter applications that are far more up-to-the-moment.
Some TechCrunch commenters welcomed an alternative to AdSense that would bring in better revenues for smaller publishers. But others brought up Technorati's system outage issues--which admittedly aren't as prolific as, say, Twitter's--and raised concerns about joining a new ad network coming from a company that some have seen as mismanaged.
One directed a comment to Technorati's management and said, "Please fix RSS feeds on search queries first, before you do anything else. They stopped working weeks ago." Another posed the question, "If they've been unable to keep the system functioning and can't track my posts, what makes you think they'll be able to track and pay out ad revenue?"
The commenter continued, "I'll stick with AdSense: I get a nice check every month!"
Technorati clearly needed to change direction in the wake of Google Blog Search, but launching an ad network might just be too little, too late.
This post was corrected to clarify when Adify was purchased by Cox Enterprises.
NEW YORK--Some have said that because of the wealth of personal information they store, social networks are the future of online advertising. Russ Fradin, co-founder and president of Adify, disagrees.
"Social networks, to date, what they've really done is drive performance-based CPMs down a lot," Fradin said in reference to the fact that a CPM (clicks per thousand impressions) rate of a dollar used to be considered low, but thanks to the influence of social networks, it's as low as three cents.
Fradin was speaking on a panel called "Networks and Beyond" at ContentNext's EconAds conference, which was held Tuesday as part of the Internet Week New York digital-media festival.
Adify, which lets enterprising media moguls create their own niche-oriented ad networks, was sold to Cox Enterprises two months ago for $300 million.
That wasn't the only potshot Fradin took at social networks, which have been subject to debate as industry thinkers try to figure out whether it's possible to do something about tepid revenues on popular sites like Facebook and MySpace. For the most part, social networks have held up behavioral targeting as the solution, using the amount of personal information on member profiles as a base. But even that isn't what it's cracked up to be, Fradin said. "I am highly, highly skeptical about (the value of) the data in social networks," he explained, saying that there were "legislative and technological" difficulties that could get in the way of use by advertisers.
"I think we've been dealing with the issue of social networks since Hotmail in 1995," Fradin concluded. "I don't fundamentally believe it's going to be such a secular shift because social networks have 'data.'"
Google will open its ad network so certified partners can serve advertisements and track ad data--a move designed to make it easier for advertisers to run campaigns across multiple companies' networks.
"This will empower advertisers to work with approved third parties to serve and track display ads, including rich-media ads, across the Google content network through AdWords, giving them more options, flexibility and control over their campaigns," Rajas Moonka, senior business product manager, said Monday on Google's corporate blog.
The network had been closed, waiting for Google to build a mechanism to review ad compliance with Google standards. There are only a handful of partners in the program now, but Google will add more as they become certified, the company said.
The certified rich-media agencies that can supply ads to the network are Eyeblaster, EyeWonder, Interpolls, PointRoll, Unicast, and Google's own DoubleClick Rich Media. The certified ad-servers are DoubleClick and Mediaplex.
