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Advertising - Wednesday, April 13, 2005

AdBrite - Profile

HQ: San Francisco, CA

Founded: 2004 (formerly known as HttpAds and MarketBanker)

Management: CEO is Philip Kaplan, the erstwhile founder of Fucked Company. You may know him better as Pud. He has now made the transition to cheerleading entrepreneur.

Investors: Sequoia invested $4 million.

Business Model: Self-service Internet ad network that brings together buyers and sellers of ad space. For advertisers, AdBrite offers a network of websites with available inventory. Publishers sign up at AdBrite to make themselves available to the advertisers. Publishers can set their own ad rates, and approve or reject every ad that's purchased for their site. Revenue split is 75/25 in favor of the publisher.

Competitors: Industry Brains, Google, Yahoo, Quigo, Kanoodle, BlogAds

Dirt: When you look at AdBrite's list of publishers, you won't recognize many them - and this could be a good thing. Unlike some of its competitors, which boast ad networks with name-brand publishers, AdBrite tends to offer access to lesser-known sites - but many of these sites have huge traffic and a good audience. This approach also relieves AdBrite of having to go, say, to Businessweek to beg them to join the network. Given the rebirth of Internet advertising, the market seems big enough to support lots of players - for now.