Articles of the Day
Microsoft Lures CNBC.com Away from DoubleClick - Watch out, DoubleClick: Microsoft wants your most precious Web audiences. Hungry for more ad syndication deals, Microsoft has convinced NBC Universal’s financially focused CNBC.com to drop DoubleClick in place of Microsoft’s adCenter platform. This month, Microsoft will begin serving all contextual ads to CNBC.com and its 2.6 million unique monthly visitors, while the display ad end of the deal is expected to begin in March 2008.
Goodby Uses Tribal Fusion For Branding, Scores ‘Freakishly High’ CTRs - Who says you can’t use an ad network for branding? According to info from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, a recent campaign that ran on Exponential’s Tribal Fusion network garnered positive lifts in both brand familiarity and awareness–in addition to “freakishly high” click-through rates (CTRs).
LinkedIn Unveils Changes - After years of middling success as a social network for professionals, LinkedIn is suddenly the sector’s hottest B2B site. Recently, Web measurement firm Nielson Online pegged the company’s growth at 189 percent year over year in October, beating Facebook and MySpace. Success has made the company more ambitious. On Monday, LinkedIn unveiled changes it hopes will draw better user engagement and more ad revenue.
Tech IPOs Are Back - Technology IPOs, seemingly a long lost relic of the dot-com bust, are coming back. The following new media and technology companies are set to open their doors to the public in 2008: NetSuite, a software maker, Classmates.com, a company that helps former classmates find one another, and Arcsight, a developer of network security software. None posted a profit in their most recent filings with the SEC. NetSuite is the biggest worry, having lost $35.7 million on revenue of $67.2 million in the most recent quarter. Worse, the company has shown no consistency in its results, according to the filing. Classmates.com recently lost $1.9 million on revenue of $134.9 million. Arcsight’s losses were even more modest: $257,000 on $69.8 million, although the company conceded in its filing that it has a history of losses and unpredictability.
YouTube Democratizes Its Ad Revenue-Sharing Program, With Limits - Last May, YouTube invited a select group of users to begin sharing in revenue from ads that run along with their content. Now, the user-gen site is opening up its “partner program,” giving all users in the U.S. and Canada the chance to compete for tapping the revenue from its overlay system. YouTube will judge its next round of partners according to the amount of pageviews and subscribers they attract. So far, 100 users have been added to the program, up from about 40, though YouTube doesn’t say how many participants are currently involved. Over the next few months, YouTube plans to make partner membership available internationally.
