“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein

Defying Google: Adify CEO, Russ Fradin (Part 6)

Monday, May 7, 2007 | 5 comments

SM: Let’s fit Adify into this framework. What is the value proposition, what is the business model? RF: When we started Adify, what we saw was the ad networks were trying to aggregate bulk amounts of inventory and apply targeting algorithms to that in order to sell a huge amount of direct response advertising. That was a game we did not want to compete in. Whether Google will dominate that, or Advertising.com, ValueClick, or TribalFusion will dominate, or whether they all grow or shrink, is for them to fight it out.

We like FM, Travel Ad Network, and Glam.

SM: That would be a tough market to enter at this stage anyway. RF: Right, so what we did was take a close look at the web, and when we did we realized there were 88 million websites. Obviously fragmentation is a huge problem. Not only are there a huge number of websites, but the percentage of time people spend on the long tail, meaning the amount of time they spend off of the top sites, is larger and is continuing to grow compared to the percentage of time they are spending on the top sites. Basically, the relative importance of any given site on the Internet is shrinking in relation to the whole category.

SM: Right. Publishing has become easy, and all those great voices everywhere who did not get to publish so far, today, not only do publish, but also, fairly rapidly, develop an audience. Often, a fairly captive, high-value audience.