Disruption Tour --- Run To Survive

OpenX Keeps On Growing, Raises $10 Million More

TechCrunch

by Robin Wauters on May 26, 2009

We’ve talked about online ad server OpenX quite a bit in the past, and for good reason. The company, formerly known as Openads, is led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (Chairman) and ex-Yahoo exec Tim Cadogan (CEO) and has in the past shown it’s serious about growing fast and making money in the process.

More recently, we covered the launch of OpenX Market, an alternative online ad exchange platform operated by the Pasadena, CA-based company.

Today, OpenX is announcing that it has raised a Series C venture capital round to the tune of $10 million, which brings the total of funding raised by the company to a healthy $30+ million. Worth noting is that the extra financing is coming from a new lead investor, which is increasingly rare in these troubled times: DAG Ventures led the round, with existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital and First Round Capital participating. Jonathan Miller, who recently was appointed as the new Chief Digital Officer of News Corp. also chipped in.

OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan in a brief interview didn’t want to go into detail about the valuation of the company after this round, other than that he was pleased with it. He did say that there was still large part of the Series B round ($15.5 million, closed in December 2007) left on the company’s back accounts and that there was no real need for them to raise money, “which of course is always the best time to raise money”.

Cadogan also told me the company is focused on making OpenX Market a success and to continuously add new publishers to its open ad technology platform Ad Server. To date, it has attracted over 38,000 publishers representing 150,000 websites for the latter, and Cadogan also informed me that Market has doubled since it launched a little over a month ago, with a current monthly run rate of over two billion impressions.

More strong figures: OpenX claims that from December 2008 to April 2009, the monthly run rate of impressions for the OpenX Hosted product grew more than 500% to 7.5 billion impressions, with the number of sign-ups for the new product now exceeding 10,000 in six months since its debut on the market.

 

Eternal September

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/eternal-september.html

Our story so far...

Back in the 1960s, TV shows took great pains to catch you up on what had happened so far. Batman spent a minute or so recapping last week's story. So did The Fugitive. The thought was that while most people had seen the show just seven days ago, what about the people who missed it?

Fifteen years ago, someone coined the term, Eternal September. Because each September sees an entire crop of freshman showing up at college, you need to assume that you have to start teaching protocols all over again. Once a year, it's a whole new audience, and they need to learn the ropes.

The Internet has been stuck in September ever since. Every day, new people show up at your blog, on Facebook, everywhere. Every day it's a whole new crop that need to figure out what RSS is and how to subscribe. Every day there are people who spam their address book because it feels like a fine thing to do, then learn their lesson and never do it again. There are new people who need to learn the proper etiquette for interacting on your site. Can you imagine if the real world worked this way? If people walking into your store had never been to a store before? If drivers on the highway had never driven on a highway before?

It's going to be a long time before the medium stabilizes enough for the newbies to catch up, so the only alternative is to accept that it's always September.

UserVoice

Santa Cruz, CA-based UserVoice is taking a couple of steps to break its product free from the in-crowd of early adopters that have increasingly turned to using its service for streamlining internal and customer feedback aggregation.

In addition, the startup had announced that it has raised an extra $800,000 from a well-known group of investors, led by Baseline Ventures and joined by FF Angel (the seed investing vehicle for Founders Fund), Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, The Accelerator Group, Net Discovery and Howard Lindzon.

UserVoice is essentially a hosted way for businesses to intelligently process the feedback it gets from employees and customers, acting as a social idea generator of sorts. This has proven to be a great way for software companies and web application developers to incorporate the tool into their product websites, basically extending their existing product feedback channels with a way for users to voice their opinions on new features, roadmap, etc.

But UserVoice rightly recognizes that there are a lot of corporations and institutions (think education, healthcare, government bodies, etc.) that can benefit from such a service too, and aims to package its main product somewhat differently in order to cater to those as well.

For that reason, it’s today releasing a white-label solution that enables its customers to embed branded widgets and communities into their websites and facilitate the streamlining of the aggregation and moderation of incoming suggestions, voting, and user feedback. These widgets can be fully customized with the ability to change the CSS, templates, language files, and more. Along with this, UserVoice is introducing ZeroLogin, a method for users to sign in to UserVoice with the same username and password as the company website that deployed its solution. To see such an integration in action, check out this feedback page on Animoto’s website, which is entirely powered by UserVoice.

Last but not least, UserVoice let us know that it has attracted a very knowledgeable advisor to help the company gain more traction: Bob Pearson, who spearheaded IdeaStorm at Dell as the company’s former vice president of communities and conversations.

One True Media Lands $9 Million for Online Video Ad Services

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on January 7, 2009 - 9:06am.

 

Redwood City, Calif. - One True Media, a provider of online advertising services for small and mid-sized businesses, announced on Wednesday that it has landed a $9 million second round of funding, led by DAG Ventures.

 

NTT Finance, and previous backer and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participated in the round, which will be used to expand the company's online advertising service.

 

Founded in 2005, Redwood City, Calif.-based One True Media offers SpotMixer, a self-service online platform that helps businesses create and manage online advertising.

 

The company said SpotMixer was recently named an authorized reseller for Google's AdWords.

 

$10 million to Yodle about Local

Posted by Caroline McCarthy

 

Yodle, a New York-based company that helps small businesses generate leads and power local advertisements, on Monday announced that it has raised a $10 million Series C funding round.

Led by Jafco Ventures, the round was completed with contributions from the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund, and previous investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The reason for raising the money? According to a release, it's because Yodle is growing fast and plans to expand further. At the end of 2008, the company had 250 employees and 5,000 customers, and reported 700 percent revenue growth from 2007.

"It's been a watershed year for Yodle, and thanks to our incredible team working hard to deliver for our customers, we expect that growth to continue in 2009," CEO Court Cunningham said in the release. "While our competitors retrench in the face of financial adversity, we are stepping up investment in our customers' success. This new funding round will accelerate product and technology development to provide increased online exposure and even stronger results for our local business owner clients."

 

RatePoint secures $10 million in funding and adds a new board member

RatePoint, which provides online customer feedback and reputation management tools and services, has secured $10 million in funding. The new round, which includes funds from existing investors, is led by new investor Castile Ventures. Nina Saberi, managing general partner of the venture firm, has been named to RatePoint’s board of directors.

 

RatePoint`s platform allows businesses to manage their reputation online with functionality that captures, manages and promotes consumer reviews and feedback on their web sites. The platform verifies reviews for authenticity and gives business managers the opportunity to respond to negative feedback before it’s posted online. The platform also offers e-mail marketing and online surveys.

 

According to Neil Creighton, CEO of RatePoint, the ability of the company to secure funding in the current economic climate is an indicator of the growing importance of online reputation management and RatePoint’s position. “Small businesses realize the need to proactively manage what’s being said by customers about their products and services online, especially in a highly competitive marketplace,” Creighton says.

 

Saberi calls RatePoint “a unique service that enables businesses to manage and enhance their online reputations. As investors in market-transforming businesses, Castile recognizes in RatePoint the vision and differentiated technology that positions them for leadership in this new market.”

Linkstorm Raises $2.8 Million Angel Round, On Strength of Unique Web Advertising Performance Enhancement Model

New Investors Include Rick Braddock, Donn Rappaport

New York, NY - March 23, 2009 — Performance enhancing, online advertising technology company Linkstorm today announced the completion of a funding round of just over $2.8 million from several new and repeat Angel investors. Among the new investors are Rick Braddock, former president and chief operating officer of Citicorp and its principal subsidiary, Citibank N.A., and subsequently CEO of Medco, Priceline.com and currently FreshDirect.com, and Donn Rappaport, Co-Founder and CEO of American List Counsel (ALC) and the 2008 Chairman of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

"Linkstorm continues to attract marketing visionaries as investors, board members and employees," said Ari Brandt, CEO, who himself joined Linkstorm recently from Condé Nast Digital, Yahoo!, Doubleclick and SmartMoney.com, and who last week announced the hiring of Lou Tosto as SVP of Sales & Operations. Mr. Tosto had been VP of Sales for Business Week and BusinessWeek.com, and was previously General Manager of SmartMoney.com. "Our recruiting efforts are succeeding for the same reason that advertisers, agencies and publishers are ramping up their activity with us: that in this challenging economy, our message of restoring the ROI for Display Advertising is resonating with all players."

"What I find compelling about Linkstorm," said new investor Rick Braddock, "is that it makes advertising customer-centric for the first time. Instead of pushing messages at the customer, even as assisted by the various targeting techniques that are popular today, Linkstorm enables the customer to choose their own pathways to the products, transactions and marketing messages that answer their own needs."

"In simple terms," added Donn Rappaport, "Linkstorm converts on-line display advertising from a passive, one-way medium to a truly interactive, highly participatory form of engagement that not only results in better conversion rates, but also produces a wealth of critical data marketers can employ for continuous improvement of their advertising efforts."

Commenting on the funding, David Sidman, Linkstorm Founder and Chairman, said: "The fact that we were able to raise $2.8 million from both new and repeat investors in the midst of this economic crisis is a tribute to the power of Linkstorm's value proposition, its well-documented performance track record, and most especially, its new team."

The Series D funds will be used to expand the company's sales force and to continue building out the platform's features and serving infrastructure.

About Linkstorm

Linkstorm is an advertising technology company that is pioneering a new approach to online marketing, e-commerce, publishing and social networking. The company's unique ad enhancement technology significantly improves performance of all online advertising and enhances customer engagement by overlaying cascading menus onto any ad format and quickly connecting customers to the information they want. Clients include national and global advertisers, agencies and publishers such as Cisco, E*Trade, American Express, Wal-Mart, Nissan, IBM, Microsoft, Ogilvy, Razorfish, Grey, Digitas, MRM, AOL, Meredith and the New York Times. Linkstorm is headquartered in New York City and is funded by visionary investors such as Esther Dyson and Jim Rutt. For more information, please visit www.linkstorm.net or click http://dx.linkstorms.com/10000.1/pr57.

SeeWhy Raises $4.5 Million, Improves Website Conversion By Closely Tracking Abandoners

Techcrunch/Google News

by Robin Wauters on May 5, 2009

Imagine a potential restaurant visitor calling a place he’s never been before, asking all sorts of questions about the establishment and ultimately deciding to make a reservation elsewhere. If you’re the restaurant owner, you should be wondering what went wrong where and when, and what you can do about it. Now assume the number of people calling the restaurant and ultimately not booking grows to 10 out of 30 people who would have been ready to make a reservation if everything added up for them. Pretty important for a business to know what’s up, right?

Same thing happens with people who want to sign up for a certain web service or become a customer of an e-commerce website. Not everyone completes the process for signing up or buying something online, and the reasons can be very diverse. Website abandonment measurement and management should be high up on the priority list for any web service provider, particularly those who use the Internet to sell products, whether directly or indirectly. Evaluating the entire process that is supposed to guide a visitor towards becoming a customer should be done on a continuous basis, and it’s very important to know why people start the cycle but never finish it.

Let’s go back to the restaurant. Suppose a person who wasn’t convinced by the person answering the phone at the place hung up, turned on the radio or TV and stumbled upon an advertisement for the restaurant, making him change his mind again. I know this is an extremely unlikely scenario, but it gets more feasible when you apply this to the Web.

The above example, which you could categorize under the denominator ‘re-converting’, is pretty similar to what SeeWhy is trying to accomplish for e-commerce vendors and web application providers: try and get the abandoners (i.e. people who leave online registration or purchasing system prior to finishing the process) to come back and complete the cycle. Not 24 hours or more later, but practically in real-time.

SeeWhy has launched the free Abandonment Tracker (available as a software-as-a-service), which makes it easy to convert website visitors who had previously abandoned their shopping carts, online forms, applications and registrations. The tracker captures the unique IDs of website abandoners and then emails those IDs to the website operator for use in follow-up campaigns targeted to the abandoners. When a visitor lands on a web page again, an event is sent to SeeWhy’s data center. If the visitor doesn’t convert, SeeWhy records the abandonment along with the details, including email address, shopping cart items and amount, and stage in the conversion process at which the visitor abandoned. The whole point of the system is to recapture abandoned revenue.

Currently SeeWhy’s suite of real-time web analytic applications is being used by both large and small ecommerce companies, including Amazon.com, eBay, Land’s End, Citibank and MasterCard. The company just raised $4.5 million in funding from Scottish Equity Partners, Logispring, and Pentech Ventures.

Analog, Digital, Social

by Kevin Hilstom Minethedata.com

Folks seem to be self-selecting themselves into three camps.

The first camp is the classic direct marketing crowd, rebranded as the "multichannel marketing" audience. I call this audience the "Analog" audience. This camp knows more about strategic direct marketing than anybody else in direct marketing, having been introduced to direct marketing as the credit card, the 1-800 number, and the database took prominence. This crowd reads Catalog Success and DMNews. This crowd attends ACCM and Internet Retailer. Ask this crowd to launch a new product or service, and they'll have a business plan for you in a couple of hours, one that spans multiple channels.

The second camp is what I'd call the "Digital" crowd, online marketers who burst onto the scene during the late 1990s and early part of this decade. This crowd knows more about classic online marketing than anybody. They can tell you that shopping cart abandonment is 43.84830048% if various criteria are met. They're great at SEO and Paid Search and Banner Ads, they know that the open rate on the last e-mail campaign was 22.438%. They know and love tactics. They can be strategic direct marketers, but seem to adore their form of marketing, are are willing to forego bigger opportunities to stay loyal to their niche. This crowd attends Shop.org. Ask this crowd to launch a new product or service, and they'll have your Google marketing plan coupled with an e-mail campaign strategy ready to go in just a few hours.

The third camp is what I'd call the "Social" crowd. This crowd is motivated by technology, the "shiny new toy", if you will. The shiny new toy might be an iPhone app, it might be getting 11,000 followers on Twitter, or it might be creating a viral campaign using Facebook. This person might be 55 years old, this person might be 25 years old. Ask this crowd to launch a new product or service, and you'll have your new product or service in a few hours!

What seems to be missing from the marketing departments of 2009 is a balanced representation of Analog, Digital, and Social strategy.

The traditional catalog brand spends 50 minutes of a 60 minute meeting debating whether 124 pages is better than 116, wondering if an 8 page insert will boost demand, considering whether a Wed-Fri in-home window might work better than Mon-Wed. Analog topics dominate the meeting.

The online brand struggles with driving traffic ... we'll over-think an e-mail campaign that will cause only 1 in 700 recipients to purchase, or we'll dig into our pile of 74,000 keywords to come up with micro-copy that will stimulate clicks. Digital marketers often need analog tools to drive traffic, but there's a fierce independence among this audience.

And then we have the social crowd --- everything is viral! If the product is good enough, it will stand out on its own and will create its own audience ... so let's make it free and social and then things will work. The wisdom of the digital crowd is missing, the strategy of the analog audience seldom surfaces.

In the 2010s, the opportunity exists for a leader to straddle each frontier ... analog, digital, and social. The leader doesn't have to be an expert in each area, but the leader has to hire folks proficient in each realm.

In the 2010s, the best strategies will incorporate percentages of Analog, Digital, and Social strategy.

In 2009, I sit in too many meetings where a faction with Analog, Digital, or Social experience dominates the meeting. Knowledge of the target customer, coupled with a strong mixture of varied experience, will yield positive results.

Offer Better Feeds

Put your content in front of more people...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/12/10-ways-to-put-your-content-in-front-of-more-people/

Now think about having your consumers opt-in to receive TransactionRSS feeds from RSSCheck/ShoppeSimple. See below...

Not all approaches to putting content in front of more users have to be as time-consuming and complex as developing an API. Doing one other thing could increase your views within minutes.

Users increasingly rely on RSS feeds to consume content from websites. This is especially true for news, articles and blog posts. However, some website owners are so obsessed with driving traffic to their websites that they provide only teasers of their posts via RSS. To read a whole article, the user is forced to click through to the website.

This approach to RSS is counter-productive. When a user is browsing a large number of feeds, they are less likely to read your content if they have to leave their news reader to do it.

To maximize users’ exposure to your content, ensure as much of it as possible is displayed in the RSS feed itself. Require users to click through only when absolutely necessary.

Google Reader displaying a partial RSS feed: many websites truncate their content in RSS because their advertising revenue is based on page impressions. They see driving as much traffic as possible to their website as being in their interest. This is a short-sighted.

It is also important to note that when users read content from an RSS feed, they do not have the context of your website. Ensuring, then, that your content stands on its own and that your copy incorporates calls to action is necessary.