DISQUS

VentureBeat: Tumri gives you more control over ad widgets

  • P-Air · 2 years ago
    Talk about a case of "Back to the Future", back in 1997 a company called Impulse! Buy Network was built on this very premise. It was sold to Inktomi in April of '99 for $115M, which at the time provided Softbank Ventures (Mobius) w/the best ROI of their portfolio for that year. It was before the term widgets was in vogue and these ads were called "barkers". Yahoo!, AOL, ComputerShopper, Disney's GO Network, AT&T Worldnet, and a host of other major portals were affiliates and displayed these product driven ads targeted to whatever section on their web site they were placed (ie. sports products targeted to sports content on the portal). Yes, contextual ad targeting before Google had released AdSense.

    This was a merchandising network, with such merchants as J.Crew, K-mart, and over 200 others feeding product offers into the network. These product offers could also be paired up w/such selling methods as "falling price offer", "auction", "limited time offer", and so on.

    Anyway, Inktomi ended up combining Impulse! w/their C2B acquisition (a competitor to MySimon and Junglee at the time) of an early comparison shopping engine. This made tons of sense because if you consider, having products in a comparison shopping engine or as product offers on widgets, these are simply applications of a product database. Hmmm...I wonder if a similar fate awaits these latest entrants?

    Funny to see these apps coming back strong. I should also note that at that time Accel passed on investing in the company, so I'm guessing this time around they didn't want to miss it again ;)
  • Mike · 2 years ago
    Great to see someone giving google a run for their money! Roll on the competition!
    www.thesecretsofvisualization.com/rights
  • Yan · 2 years ago
    All these widgets lack an important functionality that made Google Adsense successful -- contextual sensitivity. Widgets that need to be configured for each page are doomed to fail because of the maintenance effort they require
  • LEE · 1 year ago
    Great article!
    I should see it earlier.