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Advertising - Friday, February 2, 2007

Unfunded Tribal Fusion Growing Like A Weed

We tend to cover companies when they have a funding or liquidity event. So Tribal Fusion doesn't hit our pages much as its never taken a dime of funding. The Emeryville-based ad network says it has been profitable for something like 5 years, having been boot-strapped by its founder Dilip DaSliva.

Tribal Fusion consistently ranks as one of the top online ad networks, with its top rivals at this point being Advertising.com and Valueclick. TribalFusion's strategy differs in that it represents a smaller set of publishers. Tribal makes advertisers happy by deploying its behavioral ad server across this network.

What's next for Tribal is that it is expanding beyond brand campaigns to include the gamut of online marketing from lead generation, to performance marketing to contextual advertising. If Tribal can succeed in one or two of these as it has with brand advertising, that will really be something.

TribalFusion's management page now links to its new corporate page under the brand - Exponential. So now we need to think of Tribal as just an operating unit under Exponential which will also operate the brand units: FullTango (performance marketing); Lead Genuity (Lead generation) and EchoTopic (In-text advertising).