alarm:clock

Advertising - Monday, April 21, 2008

Travel Ad Network Jets Off With $15M In 1st Funding

travel ad network logo.png
We have known the guys from Travel Ad Network for some time. Founded back in December 2003, Travel Ad Network (TAN) has been not raised venture funding to date, but has been scrappy. It claims to be the largest online travel audience on the Internet with 10.5M Comscore monthly uniques. That's not a hugely impressive number but travel tends to garner strong CPMs.

TAN is an exclusive online advertising salesforce for over 50 travel planning and booking sites. TAN represents Kayak, RandMcNally, LonelyPlanet, CheapFlights, and RoughGuides. They key here is that TAN insists on and gets exclusive inventory.

Headquartered in New York, TAN has raised $15M in a first round of venture funding. The funding comes from Rho Ventures, Village Ventures and others.

Staying with travel, the sector continues to find venture interest. San Francisco-based TripIt, an online travel web site, has raised $5.1M in a Series B funding round from Sabre Holdings, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and the European Founders Fund. And The Nile Guide raised a first round of funding from Draper Richards and KPG Ventures.

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