Cracking the Online Video Monetization Nut: Adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi (Part 4)

I am always interested in companies which survived the crash, and especially interested when they are in such a competitive market. Here Amir outlines what steps were taken at Shopping.com led to the success of the company.

SM: What did you do differently to make a 1997 founded company survive the worst downturn in the history of our industry? What helped you survive? AA: That is a great question. I think we did two things. First, we did raise a large amount of money and that gave us more time after the bubble had burst. Second, after we realized the bubble had burst we were very quick to act and take all measures required to turn the company profitable. That included painful things such as layoffs and renegotiating all of the deals we had, and building new businesses which were profitable.

SM: Can you be more specific? AA: One thing we did is we built a very advanced search engine marketing mechanism which allowed us to buy traffic from large search engines and run campaigns which used millions of keywords in very effective ways. That became a very effective revenue generator and profit generator.

SM: So you created an optimized capability to reduce the customer acquisition cost? AA: Yes, for the acquisition of new customers using search engines. We continued to improve the product; we never stopped investing in our product so we saw organic traffic growing as well.

SM: What was the competitive landscape at the time? AA: Comparative shopping market was extremely competitive. Prior to the bubble burst, there were probably 30 or 40 companies. A year after the bubble burst there were probably 6-8 players left. Those that managed to pull through the bad times actually emerged with very strong businesses because at a core the value proposition is real to consumers, merchants and the business is valued. In many ways it is similar to what we see in video advertising today, and a lot of companies are going to do very, very well.

[to be continued]

[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 4 in the series : Cracking the Online Video Monetization Nut: Adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi
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