UK based advertising network AdSmart, which also had its presence in India through its Delhi-based venture AdRevenue, has gone bust.
A source at AdRevenue informs Crenk that the closure of AdSmart won’t affect the business of AdRevenue, but the company will now operate under a new name, E-Spot Media Pvt Ltd.
There are obviously several sites that will now be out of pocket from this closure, such as Games2win who has already published an article about their loss.
If you have more information on the closure or have been using Adsmart please drop us a comment.
It has been reported by the Silicon Alley Insider that Yahoo is closing their RSS Advertising solution.
Not much word on why — a Yahoo spokeswoman provided this statement to SAI:
Yahoo! is closing its Ads in RSS effective February 2, 2009. The beta program, which enabled publishers to place contextually relevant ads on their own site, was available to a targeted group of small online publishers. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners such as Sponsored Search and Content Match.
Silicon Alley isnt really sure why Yahoo is making this move. However, here at Crenk we know that this is just a smaller part of the big move coming from Yahoo. I have heard from inside the company that they are going to be closing a lot of departments within their contextual advertising network. Major changes will be coming with the next three months.
There is another music streaming service that we didn’t mention in our Top 10 free music streaming services and that is Spiral Frog. Spiral Frog is an ad-supported music download service which has had a huge amount of hype since launch.
Today it has been reported that Spiral Frog might be in a bit of trouble and heading towards the deadpool. These reports come from executives within the struggling company. Why is Spiral Frog in trouble? When launching Spiral Frog was in a growing advertising market in which was still yielding good CPM (cost per 1000 ads) rates, however now in the economic downturn these rates are quickly dropping. Therefore, companies need to keep increasing pageviews and presence to stay ahead of the curve. Spiral Frog has been losing a lot of traffic of late and this combined with the big licensing fees they had to pay upfront for major label catalogues means their in a lot of trouble.
There are only a couple of options that will save Spiral Frog. Firstly, a miracle could happen and they could turn around the traffic and the revenues, but that’s not going to happen. Secondly, they could get more funding and sell part of the shares, but they are running out of shares so I don’t think this would happen either. Finally, the only real option is for someone to step in and purchase the company just before they run out of money and get a bargain basement price.
To be fair in the past Spiral Frog has had a lot of issues and they have been in trouble a couple of times. This is probably what has lead to Spiral Frog getting a lot of media attention. I think Spiral Frog will be acquired by the end of 2009, its the only decent option of the company.
It has been reported today that Co.mments will be hitting the dead pool on the 11th of January. Well according to a post by Steve Rubel this morning the service will be shutting down and the founder Asaf Arkin announced it in a blog post the previous night.
I have never really understood these commenting services, because they dont seem to add too much to the user experience.
It is rumoured that Faces.com will be shortly closing their doors. The Australian social network seems to be currently offline. Faces previously raised $2 million in funding, so im sure we will see all of their assets up for sale very shortly.
