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Advertising - Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Collective Media Leads Trio of Online Ad Fundings

We had lunch with a top VC recently where we agreed that there has not been much innovation in online advertising recently. Startups continue to get funding but these are follow-on rounds.

Today Collective Media announced that it had raised $20M led by Accel Partners with return backer iNovia Capital. The NYC-based firm boasts that it saw revenue increase of over 200% and an EBITDA increase of 333% for year-end 2008 over year-end 2007.

Collective's differentiation is that it is more discerning about publisher inventory and advertisers and that it gets more out of both by technology that optimizes creative. The startup is led by CEO Joe Apprendi who was CEO of Falk North America and EVP at Eyeblaster.

Are banner ads here to stay? from Collective Media on Vimeo.

Meanwhile, Santa Monica-based The Rubicon Project added $13M led by Silicon Valley Bank with $8M in venture debt. Previous backers Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund and IDG Ventures Asia rounded out the round. That brings funding to date to $33M and raises a high bar for an acquisition that would make this a success for investors.

Rubicon competes in the online ad optimization space and claims 500 premium customers (it counts Gannett, Salon, Washington Post/Newsweek and American Greetings). It further claims to serve more than 40 billion ads per month to 500 million unique Internet users.

Finally, Cambridge, MA-based ScanScout, which sells software for inserting contextual ads into Internet video, has raised $5.1M of an $8.1M third VC round, says PEWire. The company previously raised over $7M from Catalyst Partners, First Round Capital, Time Warner and angel Ron Conway.

View - Collective Media site
View - Rubicon Project site
View - SanScout Site