Forum Moderators: bakedjake
AOL LLC has agreed to acquire online advertising company Tacoda for an undisclosed price.Dulles-based AOL, owned by New York-based media giant Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX), will make use of Tacoda's technology that discerns what sites people click on and sells the results to advertisers.
New York-based Tacoda, which employs 100 people, will be run as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.
AOL buys Tacoda To Target Advertisers [washington.bizjournals.com]
AOL wanted to be the Internet. Now, they want to be the marketing web, a player like Google. This is one way to do it. Tacoda has very, very impressive technology, but they have never been able to get traction because they thought (reasonably) that publishers would market the data for them. They were big into newspapers.
Tacoda eventually tried to build a network, but getting the publishers to cooperate and becoming large enough to attract attention proved difficult.
With this move, however, those two problems might become more easy to manage. And, the timing is good, too. Tacoda was ahead of its time. Now, Google has proven that marketing on the web, targeted, makes sense.
Good luck to Tacoda. Time, Inc. is not easy to work with. Most everyone there believes they are a genius. It's hard to tell them anything.
Oh, but wait, I forgot: They are used to that. They worked with newspaper publishers for years.
