Audience Science, an online advertising firm formerly known as Revenue Science, announced on Tuesday that it has closed $20 million in new venture capital funding.
Investors included Mohr, Davidow Ventures; Mayfield Fund; Meritech Capital Partners; and Integral Capital Partners.
Founded in 2003, New York-based Audience Science offers both an audience technology platform and a targeting marketplace.
The company says it has powered over 50,000 campaigns worldwide, and is the eleventh-largest online ad network in the U.S.
Clients include the Financial Times, Gannett, Reuters.com and New York Times Digital.
The company will use the new funds expand its audience targeting marketplace, and bolster its offering to brand advertisers, premium website publishers and online ad networks.
Undoubtedly, the internet will define our generation along with global warming and obesity. It’s the only invention that allows billions of pieces of information to be transferred across the globe every single second of every single day. If it were to one day vanish, the business world would crumble, banks would be shut, power systems and networks would falter and more importantly, you wouldn’t be able to read the latest posts here on Crenk.
Despite the internet’s numerous ways of entertaining and enlightening us it also has limitations when it comes to keeping things fresh. After an hour or so of browsing I seem to come up against a brick wall whereby I become enthralled with boredom and can’t find anything else to read, watch or listen to. That’s where glue comes in.
It’s a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox and it only takes a few minutes to install and get up and running. Basically, it’s a toolbar that allows you to see what your friends are reading, doing or watching. If they like something they glue it up on their toolbar. The same goes for you. Then, everyone in your network and indeed beyond will be able to see your favourite sites and videos and enjoy them.
I like glue because of its simplicity. They could have gone down another route altogether but they didn’t. The idea and how it works is all easy-peasy which is what counts in the world of Web 2.0. it works on the same principal of Twitter (not everyone enjoys surfing through profile pages anymore) by giving you little shots of info.
One drawback is that it can get a bit annoying constantly receiving updates from your friends. However, all you have to do is close it for a while as you enjoy a spot of surfing. 8/10
Recently there’s been a wave of news regarding brands that have been misrepresented on various social networks for
the purpose of deceiving and sharing misinformation. It has become frustrating for users to determine if a brand is honestly being represented online or managed by someone impersonating said brand. These problems can now be overcome with Verified Pages, which focuses on sharing which brands are online and where their social profiles are.
This site has been a long time coming, and users can now safely connect with the brand of their choice, having comfort that they are not communicating with an impersonator. Brands that have connected with Verified Pages understand the importance of their brands reputation.
If you’re looking to provide end users with the comfort of knowing they are connecting with the real deal, then I highly encourage you to register your brand. If you are someone looking for a specific entity to contact, search the site and find out where you can find them.
Why Did I Start VOIS? Why Did We Launch The First Social Sourcing Site Now?
There are a lot of bad websites out there. A lot.
Websites with 8-bit graphics seemingly ripped from Atari games, with laughable copy errors that immediately diminish credibility, and with such awful usability that you need a Dr. Phil intervention to calm down after surfing through the third-rate portals.
This is one reason I co-founded VOIS.com (pronounced VOICE), or Virtual Outsourcing is Social. Not only can VOIS’ collaborative approach to completing projects produce superior results – from slickly branded and intuitive websites to fun, traffic-churning widgets – but it can also make it more affordable for businesses.
Don’t get me wrong; this is not the business owners’ faults. As a blogger for a major food website, I can say first hand that these are good people with the best of intentions. But just because someone knows how to make donuts, pizza or surfboards, it doesn’t mean they should know how to create a compelling online storefront. And hiring expensive firms on retainer often isn’t a workable business model for small and medium-sized businesses, or even larger firms that don’t have the bandwidth to handle their current business needs.
That’s why VOIS seeks to connect clients with expert Web professionals – from designers to developers and copywriters – to work on a project basis. What separates us from other business match-making platforms is that we allow and encourage the clients and talent to get to know each other first by exploring robust online profiles and messaging back and forth.
Click-and-mortar, web-driven start-ups have also had to change their game plan, and VOIS was developed for these businesses, too. With start-up capital tougher and tougher to attract, it’s no longer feasible for someone to hire developer and a CTO, build an infrastructure from scratch, then roll out and ramp up a product. I’ve met many people who have burned through $500,000 before looking at a more cost-efficient way of doing things.
And I really feel VOIS is that new way of doing things. We’re keeping VOIS wide open in terms of the scope of projects we accommodate – no niche focus or specialized tunnel vision. This will help us attract more users and offer truly turnkey solutions for our users.
So as the VOIS community grows, fueled by this added interpersonal dimension, I look forward at seeing some truly amazing work forged through the power of online collaboration. In other words, no more bad websites, or half-completed start-ups that could have been the next big thing.
Have you ever spent a lot of time searching around the Internet to find the perfect social media button that can be added to your site? Well stop searching and head over to MySocialButtons. MySocialButtons does what it says on the can and offers free social networking icons and buttons to download. Buttons include TTwitter, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon and come in various different colours, styles and sizes.
Are you looking for new ways to make money from your online videos, then maybe Adap.tv might be the way forward. Adap.tv empowers online publishers to efficiently monetize and grow their online video business. The Adap.tv OneSource video ad management platform provides a simple, transparent way to manage and serve ads from multiple sources, in many formats, to capture the full revenue potential of online video content. Fine-grained control and detailed reporting help publishers maximize their online video performance. All through a single, highly efficient platform.
Adap.tv works with a lot of advertising option including post roll, pre roll, overlay banners, expanding overlay and post roll banners. Although all of this technology isn’t really new for monetizing videos, Adap.tv seems to have some good options that could potentially really help in your quest for a quality video advertising solution.
Several hundred thousand palates can’t be wrong. With this, Tsavo Media announced that it has acquired Open Source Food (OSF) from Egg & Co., a venture of Tokyo-based web producer Jon Anthony Yongfook Cockle.
With the acquisition, OSF has been renamed NibbleDish and will join Tsavo’s new network of content sites for consumers, currently in development.
Yongfook will remain with the company. A serial web-app builder, Yongfook is also responsible for the popular lifestreaming software Sweetcron and analytics tool Gumtrail. From his base in Tokyo, he works with various Japanese companies as an outside consultant, building web apps and overseeing production.
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
I received a very interesting email this morning from a new advertising network called MyBuxNetworks.com. They are offering a CPM and a CPC solution with also a referral option. The network seemed interesting in the email, however it was a totally different story when I took a look at their website.
The site itself looks terrible and so amateuristic. However, that was the worst thing I saw on the site. Check out the video I have attached below, which is from a “member”. Would you go on this guys word?
Disclosure: Im CEO of Adphilia which is a site representation company.
I have been receiving a lot of emails lately from webmasters using Technorati Media as their ad network. Techn0rati is a blog search engine which launched an ad network back in June last year. At the time it was very big news, because Technorati was losing its way a little bit and also traffic at the same time. Thus, they launched Technorati Media which would open up a new revenues stream. At the same time Technorati purchasedAdEngage which would be the backbone of the Technorati Media platform. AdEngage is a basic self service advertising platform which deals in CPC display advertising.
Anyways, Technorati Media launched their ad network with a lot of media attention and were offering some amazing CPM rates, in which was going to entice a huge amount of small and medium blogs. However, now since the economy is in a bit of a decline ad revenues have dropped but this is nowhere near the amount Technorati Media’s CPM rates have dropped.
I’m not too sure what Technorati Media is trying to achieve because using the current model they have for advertising, I’m sure they will be in a huge amount of trouble come the end of 2009. The economic crisis is not going to be fixed over night and it will take a couple of years to sort itself out, so Technorati please think of another advertising solution. CPC campaigns are great for advertisers because they get an instant return on investment for their money, but CPM is great for publishers because they can see a return on their investment. Technorati Media is struggling even to sell CPC campaigns even with some great sites on board, so this spells big trouble!
Disclosure: Im CEO of Adphilia which is a site representation company.
I have been reading Gigaom a lot lately, which is one of the worlds best technology news companies. Gigaom announced back in November that they will be leaving Federated Media for advertising revenues and move over to IDG. Since this time I have noticed a few key changes at Gigaom and was wondering if the site was being affected by the lack of quality advertising on the part of IDG?
Below is a screenshot of the Gigaom site as seem by a UK ip address.
As you can see from the screenshot Gigaom has been showing a huge amount of advertising from Chitika. These ads seem to just make Gigaom look a lot cheaper and more amateurish. Do you think the look of these ads has been affecting visitors to Gigaom?
I think it must have some affect. I have noticed these ads and from being on Gigaom several times in the last few days they have no put me off from visiting the site and actually just reading the full RSS feed instead.
Wired have decided to close Listening Post and Underwire. They are citing a great deal of overlap among Listening Post, Epicenter and Underwire so there is a wisdom to concentrating our fire where it will have the most impact.
Wired have thanks approximately 12 writers who have worked on the blog and it still hasnt been fully confirmed if they will be completely out of a job or not.
This seems to be a very strange move from Wired. It might have just been better to slowly move the Listening post material into another niche instead of just closing down the 40th most linked to blog in the world according to Technorati. I really do think it is a shame because I have been really loving the Listening Posts articles over the last year or so, and if the writers ever need somewhere to write please contact me, because we also have another blog over at RouteNote in which we are always on the look out for writers who can help musicians in the current climate.
Adify is growing into one of the largest advertising technology provides on the web. Adify was recently purchased by Cox enterprises for $300 million back in April. Adify provides a unique white-label advertising network solutions.
Currently Adify has some of the worlds largest media conglomerates using their platform to serve advertising, Forbes, The Guardian, Reuters and more. They have over 20 vertical networks that are using their service.
What does this all mean for the average web publisher? Well web publishers are able to opt in to use the Adify platform, then they can apply to join their vertical networks to sell the advertising. Thus, a publisher could have Forbes, Reuters, Break and IDG, all selling advertising for your site at the same time. Therefore, this normally provides a great eCPM for the publisher and gets them a lot more money than they would get elsewhere.
If you are a web publisher looking for a great advertising solution, make sure you head over and check out Adify, because in times of the US Dollar being quite poor, they will be sure to make you more money than most advertising networks.