Deal Radar 2008: Adify’s Market Taking Time to Develop

Adify is a vertical advertising platform co-founded by Russ Fradin with former Flycast co-founders, Larry Braitman and Richard Thompson. I interviewed Adify’s CEO, Russ Fradin in 2007.

Deal Radar 2008: Travel Ad Network Executing Flawlessly

Travel Ad Network (TAN) is the leading vertical ad network focused exclusively on travel. It reaches users across 50 websites including Lonely Planet, Kayak, RandMcNally, Skybus Airlines, Groople, TravelHero, BootsNAll, AreaGuides, HotelsByCity, EuropeForVisitors, AirGorilla, and many others. Top advertisers with TAN include American Express, Vacations to Go, Best Western, Netherlands Tourism, Tourism Australia, etc.

Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 6)

SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track? CL: We ran the company at break-even for the first three years. We didn’t have a choice. All the profits went right back into the company (and a few to American Express and Mastercard). Now that we have

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 5)

SM: What are your top target segments? CL: We’ve been called the “long tail of travel websites” but that’s not completely accurate. RandMcNally.com, LonelyPlanet.com, WAYN.com and AreaGuides.net are hardly long tail publishers. These are premium properties with deeply integrated advertising packages that command high CPMs. Generally speaking, we make most of our revenue comes from

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 3)

SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? CL: When we started Travel Ad Network, Google AdSense had just launched its textlink product and everything was about textlinks and performance advertising. No one talked about users; it was all about clicks. And the terms “branding” and “online” weren’t used in the

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Deal Radar 2008: Takkle Tackling Socially

Takkle is a social network for high school sports, where students, athletes, coaches, and fans share their passion. Takkle has a strategic alliance with Sports Illustrated. Takkle allows students to create their profiles and upload their stats, photos and videos for college recruiters. In November 2007 Takkle raised $7 million in venture funding led by

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News Corp. Charging Ahead

News Corp. has certainly been the most bold and dramatic dealmaker of 2007. Murdoch gets it. WSJ print revenues were up 7% in October and online revenues were up 30%. I have already discussed, why the WSJ acquisition is a good one, and suggested that the WSJ should go free. This week, Bear Sterns Analyst

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Deal Radar 2008: Trulia Can Consolidate Real Estate

It is raining cats and dogs. Electricity was out this morning and we just got it back. I am very behind in everything, including my writing. But here we go … Yesterday, we discussed the Kayak-Sidestep roll-up deal, and its implications on Google. Trulia is a real estate vertical search engine that could be a

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