Time Warner’s Ad Network Move

In a previous post, I discussed Time Warner’s digital media strategy. In this one, I will analyze their move into Ad Networks, via an investment in Adify, a small company providing technology infrastructure services for building and running ad networks. [If you are new to the field on online advertising, please read my interview with

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Monetizing Blogs via Ad Networks

We have spent a few weeks discussing online advertising and ad networks with the CEO of Adify. In this post, let’s take a look at how blogs would be able to leverage quality ad networks. Today, the notion of ‘A-List’ bloggers depends on 2 things: (a) Traffic (b) Content. Often, you find blogs with high

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 10)

SM: Would you give us some examples of your larger and smaller customers? RF: We work with an education related network called HotChalk, we work with a network of do-it-yourself home improvement types called HouseBlogs, we work with an entrepreneur called Robert Kadar who is starting a network called GoodHealthAdvertising, he is an expert and

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 9)

SM: What is your business model? RF: It is always based on some metric based on throughput and performance. We have folks working with us who, although we love them as customers, they are very small businesses who are going to run $20,000 a month in media. We also have folks with us who are

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 8)

SM: You are then providing the ad network infrastructure to these aggregators? RF. Yes, we are a technology and services platform that allows any network operator to build and maintain their own highly targeted ad network. If we had existed back in 2004 our pitch to FM would have been that instead of spending millions

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 7)

We talked about the fragmentation in the media business, with the long tail developing a stronger influence overall. Adify’s genesis is in this trend. SM: What is the significant opportunity you see in the fragmentation phenomenon? RF: First we realized that brand marketers are going to have a challenge.

Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 6)

SM: Let’s fit Adify into this framework. What is the value proposition, what is the business model? RF: When we started Adify, what we saw was the ad networks were trying to aggregate bulk amounts of inventory and apply targeting algorithms to that in order to sell a huge amount of direct response advertising. That

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Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 5)

SM: Where do you see Federated Media? RF: I really like what they are doing. We don’t look at them as a competitor, but we look at them as broadly in a similar space to what we do, and they are very, very smart. For Google and Yahoo, it’s not that they don’t play in

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