interCLICK Prez Katz On Strong Q2 Results
Online advertising network InterCLICK announced its second quarter 2010 earnings on Wednesday. According to the release, “Revenue was $21.7 million in Q2 2010, a 103% year-over-year increase. (…) Gross profit was $9.6 million in Q2 2010, up 102% year-over-year.” Read more.
AdExchanger.com: Looking at InterCLICK’s 100% year-over-year Q2 growth and projected 2010 revenues of $90 million + , are there any observations you can share about how clients are spending?
MK: Delivering the most effective audience-centric campaigns is dependent on our ability to properly value targeting data and solving the operational challenges associated with running data enabled campaigns. We won a record amount of new business this past quarter and client retention reached a new high watermark. This is a hyper competitive space and I believe that our investment in our technology and our team has paid off tremendously, as evident in our results.
What about data? Has using data exchanges and other third-party providers been a key part of your offering? How do you see this playing out for InterCLICK?
The challenges in display advertising require effective supply chain management. The goal is to find the optimal alignment among data, inventory, and creative. Quality inventory has been accessible for quite some time, and through data exchanges like BlueKai, rich targeting data has been made quite accessible. So data exchanges allow for easy access and implementation. The real challenge is in the execution, which is what we have invested significant capital and resources in addressing.
Read More: AdExchanger.com
Inside the Numbers: How Demand Media Will Pitch a Billion Dollar IPO
Demand Media is a money-losing company. How will it convince Wall Street to value it at a billion dollars or more? By directing investors’ attention to a set of numbers which say it’s a very profitable company. The official term for these numbers are “non-GAAP financial measures”. In English, that translates into “accounting you can’t try at home, but which shows off our company in the best possible light.” And it does! Depending on which set of numbers you want to look at, Demand lost either $4.3 million or $22.3 million on revenues of $114 million in the first half of this year. But Demand’s “Adjusted OIBDA” numbers show a company that made $25.6 million on revenue of $108 million. Much better! Some investors may balk at these non-GAAP numbers, but Demand, Goldman Sachs (GS) and its other underwriters clearly think there’s a market for them. And there’s certainly a hunger in the tech world for a big, brand name IPO to break the dry spell. You can feel people willing this thing to work. If Demand did, say, $55 million in OIBDA this year, it would need a multiple of 18 times trailing 12 months earnings to get to a $1 billion valuation. It would need 27x to get the $1.5 billion number that people are whispering to reporters. Another way to get to $1.5 billion: Project OIBDA of $100 million for 2011, and ask for 15 x on that number. Reminder: $1.5 billion would make Demand worth more than the New York Times (NYT).
Read More: AllThingsD.com
Adapt.ly to Manage Ads Across Multiple Social Networks
As advertisers begin to run ads across an increasing number of social networks and sites, startup firm Adapt.ly has developed technology to help manage those campaigns from a single platform, and to help digest and evaluate the resulting performance data more easily. As Adapt.ly co-founder Nikhil Sethi points out, most social networks offer self-service ad platforms, which exist in complete isolation of their competitors’. As a result, advertisers are forced to manually construct individual campaigns on each, despite the fact they’re attempting to reach essentially the same audience. “Managing all these campaigns by hand is a pain in the ass, and analyzing the data from all the different platforms becomes a nightmare,” Sethi said. It’s that heavy lifting that Adapt.ly is attempting to relieve, providing a service that will handle campaign creation, targeting, and optimization automatically, and from a single point of entry. “We’ve built a system that allows us to take creative and to normalize it across a range of networks. We ask advertisers two simple questions: What are you advertising, and who are you trying to reach? The system will then optimize targeting across the networks,” said Sethi, adding that users are given the option to specify creative for individual platforms if they wish, or to simply let Adapt.ly take care of it.
Read More: ClickZ
Are Marketers Really Spying On You Online?
The ongoing “What They Know” series in The Wall Street Journal is drawing needed attention to some of the ways web analysts and marketers gather and track information about people online. As part of the series, they visualized the types of cookies and tracking files used by 50 top websites, including their own. However, the WSJ failed to fully explain what type of information is being collected about visitors and what marketers do with the data. Rather, they left the public to wonder if online marketers are actually spies. I don’t deny that I use cookies and tracking pixels to gather a variety of details about you if you visit my site. However, most of the data I have is anonymous and the details exist across multiple systems, not aggregated in one tidy personal profile. Rarely do I feel like I have pieced together enough details to be considered a spy. But with all that data, what do I really know about you?
Read More: AdAge
