In the second session of the second day, it is the turn of advertising companies.
AdBrite
AdBrite has announced a new product: SPOTTT.com. It’s a link exchange program that is very similar to LinkExchange (from the web 1.0 era). Just to remind you; LinkExchange was sold to Microsoft for $265M in 1998.
Started by FuckedCompany’s founder Philip Kaplan, AdBrite says they are bringing back LinkExchange with new innovations. Instead of LinkExchange’s 2:1 ad publishing program, they have a 1:1 display program – this means for every one ad you publish, your ad is published on other sites as well. Tony Hsieh, co-founder of LinkExchange, is also assisting with the product.
SPOTTT’s ads are easily integratable into blogs and MySpace in 3 short steps. AdBrite is backed by Sequoia Capital.
Clickable
Clickable is an advertising business backed by Union Square – Pequot. The product interfaces existing advertising networks and makes the control very simple. They say they’re in the simplicity and recommendation business. They try to solve the complex problem of advertisment management and smooth up the process.
At this event, they announced a new partnership with AdBrite.
Clickable’s innovative user interfaces, like ActMap, aim to make things much easier for advertisers. This may make Clickable a valuable company in the very profitable online advertising market.
GotStatus
GotStatus is a server-side Google Analytics. What Google Analytics does is give you deep analysis of your website visitors, via a short Javascript snippet that you embed into your site. GotStatus does the same, but it’s all done on the server side. That is, you place a Ruby snippet (but note: not all servers support Ruby by default!) and they do a deep analysis of your server statistics.
They also give you the possibility to share this data on your blog via widgets. However, I wonder who really wants to do that. It is private data after all, so the widget doesn’t sound that useful.
GotStatus is an API driven, open system; the founders believe it can be further improved by the community. They eye a piece in the huge $8 B systems management market (source: Gartner).
PubMatic
PubMatic got their first media coverage from Read/WriteWeb in August 2007. Their service helps web site publishers run the highest paying ads from top ad networks. According to the company, the complexity of advertising management is growing every day – we are continously having more and more choices. Image ads, link ads, video ads, Google ads, ValueClick etc…
What they do is maximize your profits via an auction system for ads. However this sounds exactly the same as Yahoo’s RightMedia. As far as I understand, the difference is that PubMatic looks at past data, while RightMedia does it in real time.
They claimed that a Windows Themes site improved their profits 106% with PubMatic; and a Sportsvite.com did the same in the rate of 90%.
ZocDoc
Briefly, ZocDoc is the Yelp of medicals. The site is for dentist appointments. You can see dentists mapped on Google Maps, along with user feedback. The site also offers advanced search functionality. They claim to have 2% of dentists in their system already.
Edited by Richard MacManus
