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Advertising - Monday, October 11, 2004

Kanoodle - Profile

HQ: Amherst, NY and NYC

Founded: 1999

Management: CEO is Kent Keating. His CV on the Kanoodle site is totally baffling. Three other execs are Sprinks/About.com/Primedia refugees who arrived wholesale in late 2003.

Investors: Insight Venture Partners invested undisclosed amount in December 2003.

Business Model: Provides the Holy Trinity of search engine marketing products: search-targeted, context-targeted, and behavior-targeted sponsored links. Partners include search sites like Infospace and content sites like MSNBC.com. Most recent product, BrightAds, competes directly with Google's do-it-yourself AdSense program, allowing smaller site publishers to feature sponsored links on their sites. Kanoodle shares the revs 50/50.

Competitors: Quigo, Industry Brains, ContextWeb, Tacoda

Dirt: Kanoodle is yet another contextual ad start-up trying to take some scraps off Google's table. As we've maintained, this isn't such a bad place to be. If Google's growth projections are accurate, there should be plenty of business to go around. At some point, however, these companies will begin to consolidate or die.