Online advertising revenues hit a record $5.9 billion in the U.S. in the first quarter, reflecting an uptick in the country’s economy as well as the increasing role of online advertising in marketers’ campaigns, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said in a report.
The figure represents a 7.5% gain from the same period a year ago. Commenting on the increase, Randall Rothenberg, IAB President and CEO, said innovation and technology giving access to real-time information and 24/7 entertainment drove the industry which, in turn, “lends major fuel to the U.S. economy.”
Local advertising platform Reply.com has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock.
Jefferies & Company, Inc. and Piper Jaffray & Co. will jointly run the books for the offering. Needham & Company, LLC and ThinkEquity LLC will act as co-managers.
The number of shares to be sold and the offering price have yet to be determined.
Reply.com is based in San Ramon, California. Their ad offering works on a cost-per-click (CPC) or a cost-per-lead basis.
Most revenues were related to online advertising.
Chinese search company Baidu posted Q4 2009 earnings yesterday afternoon. Revenues came in at $184.7 million, up 39.8% from Q4 2008. Net income was $62.7 million, up 48.2% year-over-year.
“The year ended on a positive note as Phoenix Nest’s better than anticipated performance helped us to exceed expectations for the fourth quarter,” said Robin Li, Baidu’s chairman and chief executive officer.
Online ads were responsible for the great majority of revenues, coming in at $184.6 million. 223,000 advertisers ran campaigns on Baidu in the fourth quarter. Revenue per customer was $828, up 23.9% from Q4 2008 but down 3.4% from the previous quarter.
The San Diego-based company builds on connection between search and display.
At their annual customer conference this week, Covario unveiled their new Display Advertising Insight (DAI), a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution for large advertisers to track performance and spend in display ad campaigns. DAI is designed to integrate with Covario’s existing search marketing tools, Paid Search Insight and Organic Search Insight.
This is a smart move by Covario since data shows that a combined search+display campaign is better than search or display campaigns alone.
Microsoft has reported its Q2 2009 earnings (Q4 for many other companies) and the news is mixed for their online services division. Revenues improved over the previous quarter, but came in at a 5% loss year-over-year.
Specifically, online revenues for Q2 came in at $581 million, compared to $609 million the year prior. Q2 losses came in at $466 million compared with $320 million in Q2 2008.
The loss was blamed on a decrease in overall online advertising revenues. However, the silver lining was that Bing brought a growth in search revenues for Microsoft.
Developing applications for Twitter, Facebook, and the iPhone are all the rage right now. These networks and apps have been the driving force behind the real-time web trend.
Of course, what’s a good web innovation without a little monetization? Real-time search engine OneRiot is attempting to capitalize on social trends by launching RiotWise Trending Ads, which is based on the RiotWise ad network launched this past September.
“RiotWise is grounded on the premise that users of realtime web apps are trying to find out what’s going on right now, said Tobias Peggs, General Manger, OneRiot. “Our ads directly match that intent. RiotWise Trending Ads offers another exciting option for developers to monetize their social web applications.”
The ability to search for ads is being rolled out to the Ad Review Center, part of the new AdSense interface. Right now, only a small set of publishers have access, but Google says they’re working on extending it to more as additional publishers are invited to test the new interface.
Publishers will be able to search for ads a variety of ways including:
- keyword
- display URL
- destination URL
- placement targeted to their site
- AdSense for mobile
- AdSense for feeds
Publishers will then be able to filter their search by allowed, blocked and new ads.
Advertise.com and SEMPO are releasing the results of a survey about underutilized online marketing technologies. The survey was conducted in August and apparently some of you marketers out there are itching for a chance to remarket your products. Remarketing, also known as retargeting, topped the list of most under-utilized marketing technologies. Here’s what else made the list:
- Remarketing/Retargeting – 46.3%
- Geo-targeting – 18.3%
- Traffic source optimization-15.9%
- Keyword targeting – 13.4%
- Other – 3.7%
- Category targeting – 2.4%
And it looks like most of your desires for remarketing are going unrequited. When asked if remarketing had been tried with online advertising, this is what happened:
Google has announced a new agreement to acquire Teracent, a San Mateo display advertising optimization startup. Teracent uses technology that chooses from thousands of elements and machine-learning algorithms to serve up ads in real-time.
Elements include tweaking colors, images, messaging, and products. Then the ads are targeted even more according to location, language, time of day, etc.
The acquisition is expected to be complete sometime this quarter. After that, Google plans to implement Teracent’s technology to the Google Content Network and DoubleClick.
Google has announced a new agreement to acquire Teracent, a San Mateo display advertising optimization startup. Teracent uses technology that chooses from thousands of elements and machine-learning algorithms to serve up ads in real-time.
Elements include tweaking colors, images, messaging, and products. Then the ads are targeted even more according to location, language, time of day, etc.
The acquisition is expected to be complete sometime this quarter. After that, Google plans to implement Teracent’s technology to the Google Content Network and DoubleClick.
