alarm:clock

Advertising - Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Facebook Ad Network BuddyMedia Raised $6.5M

buddymedia.png
We got a little confused today at Adtech because we saw an eBuddy mascot, we had talked with BuddyTV and we picked up on the funding for BuddyMedia. Listen Buddy.

Tied with the closing of its series B financing Buddy Media launched its ad network. Ron Conway, Greycroft Partners, and the European Founders Fund contributed to the $6.5M round along with 14 of the company's Series A investors. Launched in September 2007, Buddy Media helps publishers and advertisers promote and monetize social media applications. Its clients are primarily major brands, ad agencies and large media companies that want to leverage the social networks.

Buddy Media claims a rapid application development platform lets brands launch their applications in a matter of weeks. Its AceBucks loyalty program promotes user engagement with the applications.

Based in NYC, Buddy Media says its network of applications have grown to over 8M users and over 180M page views per month. The company's founder and CEO Michael Lazerow sold U-Wire to Student Advantage and GOLF.com to Time Inc.

In September 2007, Buddy Media raised $1.5M from angel and venture investors, including Keith Bank (KB Partners), James Altucher (Stockpickr.com, TheStreet.com), Peter Thiel (PayPal founder, Clarium Capital and Facebook angel and board member), Roger Ehrenberg, Mark Pincus ( Support.com, Tribe, Freeloader and Facebook angel) and Bay Partners. It's interesting to note that a number of Facebook investors are investing in a Facebook advertising network.

lazerow.png
BuddyMedia's Michael Lazerow


VC Mike gets the interview after the launch

View - site


More Recent Articles

ThumbBehavioral Ad Network JellyCloud Raises $11.5M

Friday May 16, 2008

Redwood City's JellyCloud has called down $6.6M of a $12M Series A1 round, says PEWire. Investors are Softbank America,US Venture Partners , Crosslink Capital and Sand Hill Capital. JellyCloud is led by CEO Scott VanDeVelde who was CEO at Claria (aka adware's Gator). Others in the leadership come from Claria. JellyCloud is in semi-stealth mode but leverages patented behavioral targeting technology on behalf of Advertisers, Publishers, Software providers and ISPs. The key here is ISPs. The trend among behavioral networks is to partner with ISPs to match data that ISPs have on Web traffic with ads that want to be targeted. As with Claira, it looks like Jellycloud is starting to become controversial. We spotted some complains on message boards like this one from Darlene T: "How do i get grape.jellycloud.com to stop coming up as my home page. I don't know what it is.?" and from Woodbrooke "My internet history keeps reporting grape.jellycloud.com, i don't know what this is?" View - site...

ThumbAsk.com Picks Up Dictionary.com After It Was Jilted By Answers.com

Thursday May 15, 2008

Ask.com is buying Dictionary.com parent Lexico (which also owns Thesaurus.com. If it sounds like this is a repeat of an old post that's because Answers.com had announced it would pay $100M for Lexico last year, before that deal went south with Answers' financing. The NY Times reports that Ask.com will also pay about $100M. Ask.com says that buying Lexico will expand its audience by 11% thanks to 145M unique monthly users. An eye-popping number is that Lexico currently only has 20 employees. Wow. View - site...

alarm:clock © 2004-2008