Ad Network Adify Said To Be Sold To Cox Communications For $300 Million
Written by on April 28th, 2008 in Ajax News.
As strange as it might sound, cable company Cox Communications is acquiring Adify, according to the Washington Post (via PaidContent). That would make it a ten-bagger for investors Venrock, US Venture Partners, NBC’s Peacock Equity fund, and Time Warner, who put in a total of $27 million over the past two years. This will be the second Internet advertising startup founders Larry Braitman and Richard Thompson sold for big bucks. The first one was Flycast Communications, which CMGI (remember them?) bought in 1999 for $2.3 billion, after it went public.
Adify is an ad network for niche publishers that lets advertisers and publishers contact each other and negotiate directly for ad space. It also lets Websites reject advertisers, and lets large publishers such as the Washington Post create their own ad networks. Comscore doesn’t even rank it among the top 50 ad networks.
So what would Cox, a cable company, want with it? Well, ad networks are still kinda hot, and there is always the greater fool theory. Or maybe they like the technology, and want to apply it to targeted TV ads through Project Canoe. No official word yet from either company.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/279758037/