Tacoda goes to AOL
What do we hear there? TechCrunch alerted me that AOL seems to have bought Tacoda. The New York Post is talking about it too, citing prices between $200 and $300 million. the NYP article was actually linked right from the Tacoda Homepage. :) We had some turmoil some weeks ago in the ad server market and AOL only got the small player in AdTech (not the conference, the ad server ;)) And now it seems like they got themselves an ad network. Actually it really goes into the behavioral targeting world, about which Jeremy Liew has some good thoughts.
The thing is though that this might hot up the behavioral ad market too. It is important to note though that Tacoda also is a network, even though I am not sure how the network is booked, e.g. do they get the rests from publishers because they can monetize them better (Update: seems like it.), do they pay fixed up front and hope to make a margin, or are they first choice and simply really pay more. AdWeek has a good article on behavioral ads, in that they might even click worse, but have higher conversions afterwards.
The thing is that AOL already has advertising.com, and they are a network of sorts, and I don’t know what Tacoda ads to the equation. The thing is that some big publishers might cancel their relations with Tacoda due to a possibly buy from AOL. We really need an independant player in that market. wunderloop might be one (Disclosure: Michael Kleindl is Chairman of wunderloop and Investor in Ormigo) or nugg.ad.
One thing is important though. Whoever gets to see people on niche sites, gets to target them on the big non-focused sites. So I might agree with Jeremy that that is the really important part for the behavioral market guys. Happy to learn more.