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

Read Full Article »

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

Read Full Article »

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

Read Full Article »

Microsoft Launches Its Israel R&D Center

By Danny Cohen, Guest Author [SM: I have a great deal of interest in seeing technology and entrepreneurship thrive in other locations besides Silicon Valley. Danny’s article here provides a crisp update on the Israeli scene.] A couple of days ago Microsoft announced the opening of a new R&D center outside of Tel-Aviv. For the

Read Full Article »

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

Read Full Article »

Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 4)

SM: Do you think the Doubleclick acquisition brings relationships to the table which would take Google a long time to build? RF: I don’t know about that. I don’t mean this in a negative way about the acquisition. I am skeptical that there is any relationship which DoubleClick has, which Google does not already have.

Read Full Article »

Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 3)

SM: How do you view the DoubleClick acquisition by Google? RF: It looks like a very smart acquisition, because it looks like it helps Google get where they were going anyways, just faster, which is being in the ad serving space and really trying to compete in the display ad portion of the market. I

Read Full Article »