AppNexus, an ad-buying “platform,” has raised $5 million in round led by Kodiak Venture Partners, along with Venrock and First Round Capital. The company is one of many trying to take advantage of “real-time” bidding for Web display ad inventory.
Here’s your daily dose of goodish news about the Web ad business, courtesy (again) of Mark Mahaney, who says display ads are perking up. Or at least some of them are.
Here’s a front-page story the New York Times would rather not be running: The paper is warning readers to be aware of bogus ads running on its Web site.
The paper says “some readers” have seen unauthorized pop-up ads promoting antivirus software on NYTimes.com, and warns visitors who see the ad not to click on it but to restart their browsers instead. While the Times doesn’t spell this out, it has likely had its site hijacked by a “malware” scammer who is trying to trick visitors into installing pernicious software onto their hard drives.
Wal-Mart is the world’s biggest retailer, but online, it’s still a relative piker. Now the company is trying to change that by opening up its Web store to other retailers–just as its biggest competitors already do. But no need for Amazon and eBay to start sweating just yet.
Give this to Steve Ballmer: After getting roundly hammered in the past few years for either missing out on deals (see: AOL/Google) or paying too much for the ones he did land (see: Facebook at $15 billion), he seems to be on a roll.
Last week, Microsoft was roundly praised for the way it structured its Yahoo deal. And today, the company seems to have struck a smart pact with Publicis, which will pay $530 million for Redmond’s Razorfish digital ad agency, which Ballmer never wanted anyway. Just as important: The French ad giant will agree to buy a certain amount of search and display inventory from Microsoft over the next five years.
Web video companies that wanted to take on YouTube are having a very hard time. But Web video isn’t going away, either, and there has to be some way to make it work for users, publishers and investors. Right?
Hence, another round of funding for 5min, a video start-up that just raised a $7.5 million B round. New investor Globespan Capital Partners led the round, and Spark Capital, the VC shop that has made several video bets (along with a big one in Twitter) made a second investment.
When will the online ad market finally start bouncing back? We’ve yet to see it in Q2 earnings reports from the likes of Google and Yahoo.
But one observer says it’s already here: Ad optimization firm PubMatic reports that prices for ad-network inventory it sees have increased 35 percent since the beginning of the year.
More love from Google for its oft-maligned YouTube unit: Last week, Google officials went out of their way to praise the video site’s progress and said it was well on its way from money pit to profit center. Today, the company gives YouTube a pat on the back via an atta-boy blog post. Not much new here, but the message is that the Google folks are feeling ever more confident about YouTube’s prospects. But not enough to actually talk about them in concrete terms.
YouTube generates billions of views but no profits. That’s because Google’s video site only sells advertising on a small portion of the clips it shows. That may be changing, argues Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay.
What does it take to add a third player to a joint venture between two media conglomerates? More than four months of negotiations. Tens of millions of dollars help, too. That’s what finally got Disney to join up with GE’s NBC and News Corp.’s Fox in Hulu, the fast-growing Web video site. Here’s what that means for the three networks and the rest of the Web video business.
Next to no news from the Apple earnings call this afternoon, which is just the way Apple execs like their earnings calls. Once again, the company provided no information about CEO Steve Jobs’s health except to note that he is still scheduled to come back to work in June. And the company continued to pooh-pooh the concept of netbooks–supercheap, supersmall laptops with very little horsepower that are the hottest part of the PC business right now.
Media giant Zenith Optimedia says the ad market is in worse shape than it had previously suspected. This is what Zenith Optimedia, along with just about every other ad forecaster, has been saying every three months or so for the past year. So it’s hard to get worked up about this stuff. The upside is also old news: Online advertising is doing better than traditional ads.
In October, Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis laid off staff at his human-powered search engine. Then he announced he was hiring engineers for a mysterious new “Project A.” Today he’s unveiling it: An “answers” service designed to compete with one of Yahoo’s most successful sites.
Americans spent billions on CDs last year. But big-box retailers are increasingly uninterested in selling the discs in their stores. Newest data point: Borders Group, which has cut its music inventory by 30 percent in the last year.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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