People are urging Philip Kaplan to restart his FuckedCompany site that gathered so much attention earlier this decade. Clone sites are popping up to fill the void during this down market, and people sort of see the world of dead and dying startups as Kaplan’s territory.
He strongly considered re-starting the site and even had a former Valleywag writer lined up to do the hard work. But on second… → Read More
As overall online advertising continues to weaken, display ads are absorbing the brunt of the downturn. So what do you do if you are in the online display business with an ad network that reaches 85,000 mostly-smaller sites that don’t command much of a premium per impression in the first place? You start selling those banner ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, which is exactly what AdBrite… → Read More
It’s not a happy day at San Francisco-based Adbrite this morning. The company is laying off 40 employees, which is 40% of total staff. Among those that are leaving are VP Marketing Paul Levine and VP Finance Bob Feller.
This is the second Sequoia-backed startup to report significant layoffs after last week’s meeting where Sequoia warned the CEOs of their portfolio companies of the long lasting… → Read More
Through a variety of sources we’ve confirmed that Technorati is making plans for a major shift in its going forward strategy, and is also considering a number of corporate development transactions. First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising – their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised… → Read More
Spottt, which went into private beta at TechCrunch40, launches to the public today. The product is part of the Adbrite advertising network, but is being run as a separate brand. It is a reincarnation of sorts of LinkExchange, an advertising network that launched in the mid nineties and was later acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million. LinkExchange co-founder Tony Hsieh (also the CEO of… → Read More
AdBrite might have just secured an additional $23 million in funding, but at midnight tonight its business prospects may look decidedly dimmer. Competing ad network Etology is cutting deals with some of AdBrite’s biggest customers to take over their ads. A big chunk of the ads that AdBrite serves are for porn sites on behalf of the AVN Media Network. These AVN Ads make up 31 percent of… → Read More
Ad networks are still catching money like rain. AdBrite raised $23 million from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Hedge fund Artis Management, reports Dan Primack. This is on top of $12 million, the company has already raised. In October, comScore ranked AdBrite as the 26th largest ad network after MySpace. Its ads reached 71 million people that month, representing a 39 percent reach of U.S. → Read More
Session six as follows, including our live notes. Spottt (Adbrite) Spottt helps like-minded sites promote each other for free. Just put a Spottt on your site, blog, or MySpace profile. Every time you show someone else’s ad, they’ll show yours. Spottt was created by AdBrite, with the assistance of Tony Hsieh, co-founder of LinkExchange. Simple model, 1:1 exchange model. Same as original… → Read More
When I wrote a post earlier today suggesting that YouTube was not the first to use a Flash overlay advertisement for online video, I didn’t realize I’d be getting so many emails and comments disputing exactly who first invented the unit. VideoEgg has certainly been doing this for a year or so. In a comment to that post, though, an (unconfirmed) ex-YouTuber says the idea was… → Read More
It may seem weird, but I’ve been eagerly awaiting the day when I see ads in my viral video. eMarketer expects online video advertising to nearly double in 2008 to $1.3 billion, but no one’s really nailed a scalable ad platform for video. However, Google’s been quietly testing their own system and there are a bunch of other startups tackling it as well. There are a couple key… → Read More
britepic_id = “297898″ britepic_src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/144942552_81a96c87cb_o.jpg”; britepic_keywords=”Laguna, dog, pets, cute, perfect”; britepic_show_ads=”1″; britepic_caption=”Laguna: Attack Dog”; britepic_width=”560″; The basic format for embedding images into a web page using the <img> tag has… → Read More
Ad Network Adbrite, which we wrote about in November, has soft launched a new video product that is going to be very popular with bloggers and other sites that embed a lot of video. The new product is called In Video. Adbrite has created an embeddable video player similar to YouTube, Photobucket, etc. (see video below using their player). If we choose to show a video on TechCrunch, we can use this… → Read More
In 2002, page views on Philip Kaplan’s infamous FuckedCompany website were going through the roof – and he needed an advertising platform to monetize those visitors. He couldn’t find the self-service product that he needed, so he built his own with co-founder Gidon Wise. That ad platform was eventually spun out of FC and turned into Adbrite. Today, it”s the 11th largest ad… → Read More
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