| Status | Privately Held |
| Website | www.adbrite.com |
| Blog | blog.adbrite.com |
| Category | Web |
| Phone | 877.232.5200 |
| Address |
731 Market St. 5th Floor San Francisco, CA, 94103 USA |
| Total | $35M |
| Series A, 9/04 1 Sequoia Capital | $4M |
| Series B, 2/06 2 Artis Capital Management Sequoia Capital | $8M |
| Series C, 11/07 3 Artis Capital Management Sequoia Capital | $23M |
In 2000 Philip Kaplan started FuckedCompany.com, a website focused on covering the demise of dot-coms. It didn’t take long for the site to become a hit, attracting as many as 4 million visitors a month. With advertisers knocking at the door Kaplan created his own automated advertising program, which has evolved into AdBrite.
Adbrite first started taking advertising for sites other than FC in 2003, and they raised $4 million in venture capital from Sequoia in September 2004 (Mark Kvamme joined the Adbrite board of directors). In February 2006, Adbrite raised another $8 million from Sequoia and Artis Capital, the same pair that invested together in YouTube. Two months later Philip Kaplan replaced himself as CEO, bringing in Shopping.com veteran Iggy Fanlo to run the show.
With Fanlo at the helm AdBrite has introduced a number of new offerings including Adbrite 2.0, BritePic and InVideo. Adbrite’s newest technology is Spottt, a service facilitating free banner exchange between websites.
| Website | www.adbrite.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | July 16, 2007 |
| Tags | adbrite, advertising, internet-ad-marketplace |
AdBrite, dubbed “the Internet’s ad marketplace,” has allowed advertisers to target keywords and choose specific sites to advertise on since inception. The network changed from a simple marketplace to a much more powerful one when AdBrite 2.0 was launched in November of 2006.
This latest version of the site gives advertisers a number of ways to setup a highly targeted ad campaign. Adbrite determines demographic data for visitors to network publishers via a cookie and reverse IP lookup. They grab U.S. census data based on the zip code of the visitor, which gives them data on ethnicity and income level. Adbrite also looks at Comscore data for each site that user visits, which gives them reasonably good age and gender data. Once a user visits enough sites, Adbrite has a very good idea of the age, gender, ethnicity and income level of that particular user. Advertisers can then choose to target their ads to certain users.
In addition to text and banner ads Adbrite offers a few other interesting ad formats. Interstitial ads are full page ads that take over an entire page when a visitor first comes to a website. Another ad format is the Inline ad, which pops up over page content when a highlighted keyword is rolled over.
InVideo is AdBrite’s intriguing video ad format. This embeddable video player (similar to YouTube), allows video publishers to insert their logo (as a watermark) and AdBrite ads into any video. Anyone who takes the content and embeds it on their own site will show the same video, with the same ads and watermark. All click backs on the video go to the original site.
Lastly, in March of 2007 AdBrite launched BritePic. They describe BritePic as “the IMG tag on steroids.” By changing the embed code, web publishers can add a caption, watermark, zoom, share, resize and an advertisement, if they choose to.
| Website | Spottt.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | September 16, 2007 |
| Tags | spottt, link-exchange, advertising |
Spottt helps like-minded sites promote each other for free. Just put a Spottt on your site, blog, or MySpace profile. Every time you show someone else’s ad, they’ll show yours. Spottt was created by AdBrite, with the assistance of Tony Hsieh, co-founder of LinkExchange.
