NEWS: VC Thoughts on Advertising Networks

What a Microsoft Yahoo deal would mean for startups (continued)

...What this potential deal could mean for startups are two things. One, when Microsoft finally integrates its 3 or more advertising platforms with Aquantive, adcenter, and Panama, they may just be able to offer startups a decent or even better alternative to using Google Adsense to monetize their inventory. 

Secondly, that huge collective sigh you are hearing is one that is based on the fact that there will be one less independent multi-billion dollar acquirer for the thousands of startups out there. ...

The "Hidden Return" Of Online Advertising

We all know that online advertising benefits from being measurable and that it's returns are often better than offline advertising. But the one thing we have not been able to measure is the offline impact of online advertising. I have frequently cited a comscore study from years ago that showed that >80% of transactions initiated with online search were transacted offline.

Direct ad sales and startups

I have recently met a number of startups with interesting consumer applications or services.  As expected, many of these startups have a vision to rely on advertising to pay the bills.  And like many startups, a number of these companies have plans to add a direct ad sales staff over time.  That makes a ton of sense, but what I believe is that many entrepreneurs underestimate the direct capital and management costs necessary to build such a team.  

He (Microsoft) has no credibility, but I think he's 100% correct

What advertisers need -- and what I would like to invest in -- is a company offering a web-based analytic product that helps bring banner ads, email marketing and search marketing all into a single dashboard/framework. It would allow an advertiser to measure the impact of increased banner advertising on the efficacy of its search marketing. In other words, the tool would allow advertisers to properly measure and allocate performance across ad media.

The Roving Eye: Eqyptian Unrest News Source, Howl's Moving Moonbase, Yahoo's Ad Platform

Ad Vapor From Yahoo. Yahoo preannounces an ad management platform, that might help to enable the kind of site ad network that I blogged about before. The catch is that the rollout won't start until Q3, which won't have any impact on the current Microsoft takeover attempt. On the other hand, this could enable the type of destination site grand alliance that I mentioned in that post, combining the Microsoft and Yahoo properties and other big exposure ad venues, where the Google approach to ads hasn't worked so well.

Forecasting ad sales for web startups - 6 days ago

Andrew Chen has a good post on how to forecast advertising for web startups : The right way to model out inventory is a number of equations - I’ll pretend that a site has two types of inventor...

Marc Andreessen is writing about the history of newspapers and how that compares to the birth of new media. I had a conversation about this very issue with Antony maybe 18 months ago, and I do think it's a fascinating subject. I shall be following it keenly.