Cashing Out: Week of April 19-25th, 2009 in Online Marketing News
Zango Goes Under: No one sheds a tear
Zango, aka the spyware company formerly known as 180Solutions, is no more. According to Chief Technology Officer Ken Smith, 100% of Zango’s assets where purchased by video company Blinkx. Ken also wrote an interesting post on what Zango Got Wrong, aside from getting hit with a $3 million dollar fine by the FTC for unauthorized downloads. While his candidness is surprising for someone from Zango, he still tries to plead Zango’s innocence on a variety of things including distribution choices and stealing affiliate commissions. Have to wonder if, having resurrected before if Zango will return through Blinkx in another form.
Digg Dumps Microsoft
Two years after entering an exclusive advertising contract with Microsoft, Digg has terminated the agreement. Microsoft will still retain rights to sell remnant inventory while Digg attempts to go the direct route relying on its own internal ad sales team. The transition is scheduled to take place in July with the focus centered on custom, non-IAB inventory combined with standardized banner ads.
Attributor Brainchild Attempts Ad Sharing Compromise Between Content Creators and Scrapers
Supported by the likes of Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico, Attributor has launched Fair Syndication Consortium. The idea behind the Consortium is negotiate en masse with ad networks who run ads on sites that simply scrape original content. For every full article that is copied and monetized through something like AdSense, the Consortium’s goal is get a portion of the revenue generated back to the original content creator. The argument being that such group negotiations are easier than sending take down notices.
Below is graphic that according to TechCrunch Attributor displaying which ad networks scrapers rely most on:
Goodbye to GeoCities
One of the first site-creation portals and online communities will be just a memory later this year as Yahoo officially announced that it will be closing GeoCities. The portal is already closed to new accounts while existing customers are being given some time to move/save data and or transfer to Yahoo’s Web Hosting services.
