Jason Del Rey of Ad Age reports, “DG, a traditional-TV ad delivery company that moved into the online-ad space with last year’s acquisition of MediaMind, has acquired semantic ad-targeting startup Peer39 in a deal that could reach $15.5 million in cash and stock. Peer39, which is based in New York City, will get $10 million up front in addition to approximately 357,000 shares of DG stock. The acquisition also includes a $2.3 million earn out.” Read our previous coverage of Peer39 here. Read more

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The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2012 report was just published, and among the findings is that efforts by most top news sites to monetize the web in their own right are still limited. Few news companies, it reports, “have made much progress in some key new digital areas. Among the top news websites, there is little use of the digital advertising that is expected to grow most rapidly, so-called “smart,” or targeted, advertising.”

 

 

Failing to make a lot more hay from digital ads is problematic for traditional news companies given the decline in print circulation and in its ad revenue, too. The report says that in 2011, losses in print advertising dollars outpaced gains in digital revenue by a factor of roughly 10 to 1, which it calls an even worse ratio than in 2010.

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 A recent survey of media buyers conducted by semantic advertising vendor Peer39 revealed – as you might expect – an intense interest among that audience in page quality and quality controls on their online campaigns. Only five percent of respondents said page quality doesn’t matter, and only eight percent said they don’t currently use quality controls. For 87 percent of them, about 50 percent or more of campaigns require quality controls.

The top quality attributes for campaigns, they say, are content-rich environments (52 percent), home pages (51 percent), and user-generated content (55 percent).

UGC is a tricky problem in the online advertising space, because it adds more risk – site owners do what they can to ensure that comments don’t transgress boundaries but moderation only goes so far, or is otherwise subject to time-, resource- or cost-constraints. Not to mention that user comments that some advertisers may find inappropriate aren’t necessarily something that would be flagged as problematic by human moderators or automated systems.

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According to a recent release, “Peer39, a leader in the semantic advertising industry, today announced three key additions to its New York headquarters. Ronit Dvir-Bacalu will join Peer39 as vice president of finance from online ad verification company DoubleVerify. Ross Sandler joins as senior director of agency sales from MediaMath, and finally, Erik Johnson joins the team as business development manager from PointRoll.” Read more

Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers this week unveiled responses to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) call for a Do Not Track browser option.

What’s the impact on the online advertising community? Andy Ellenthal, CEO of semantic web advertising company Peer39, thinks the efforts are good for all involved, including advertisers. “Starting with the obvious, if users have the perception that they’re being stalked, it is not good — not for consumers and not for the industry,” he says. “These new tools from Google and Mozilla, which empower users to easily manage their online data exposure, address this perception by easily and openly giving users control, which is good for all parties involved — users, advertisers, publishers and even the government.”

Maybe even better for those advertisers leveraging semantic web technologies. Ellenthal previously told The Semantic Web Blog that “the increasing government pressure on audience data targeting in fact will drive a renewed interest in relevancy via semantic targeting.” Peer39 offers its SemanticMatch technology to understand web content and send along relevant ads on the fly, vs. observing their browsing habits as they visit pages across the web.

J. Brooke Aker, CMO of Expert System spin-out Admantx, sees some good coming out of it for the semantics-infused ad space, too.

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Image Courtesy: Flickr/Lori Greig

It doesn’t matter whether this month you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, or anything else. In December, most everyone’s thoughts turn to presents. So, what makes it to the top of some semantic web and data experts’ holiday gift lists for their friends, family, colleagues – the world?

We asked, and their (mostly) semantic-web inspired holiday lists include some real and some imagined – not to mention imaginative – ideas. Read on:

John Breslin, Lecturer and researcher at NUI Galway, Creator of SIOC

If I could give out some Christmas tools or tips to colleagues or friends, the first would be to try out Drupal 7 on their own website, and get the metadata out there. I’d also ask that my friends show their friends some of the cool semantically-powered tools like Siri or Sig.ma to show the power of linking things together with semantics. Finally, in terms of useful non-semantic free programs, I’d give out Evernote, Dropbox, Inkscape, the Gimp, and TweetDeck (great for multiple keyword searches like “semantic web” OR semanticweb OR “sem web” OR semweb). Oh, and an online backup program of your choice, like Mozy or CrashPlan!

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There’s a whole lot of privacy discussion going on at the federal level, with the Federal Trade Commission proposing a Do Not Track browser option. The idea is that consumers could limit cookies or other sniffers that open the door to tracking their browsing behavior for the purpose of delivering online ads. It’s the do-not-follow equivalent to the Do Not Call list.

Is that good news for the semantic web advertising space? Peer39 CEO Andy Ellenthal thinks so. “As it relates specifically to Peer39 it certainly raises the visibility of non-cookie based targeting solutions like we provide,” he says. That said, however, he’s hopeful the powers-that-be proceed with caution. “The augmentation of highly contextualized or categorized data in addition to audience data is an incredibly effective combination, so it’s our hope from an industry perspective that the marketplace and industry and Congress deals with this in an appropriate manner, and not just react to limited amounts of information, because the reality is the audience-data providers do add a tremendous amount of value to the publishes and to the buyers.”

Agreeing with that viewpoint is Raleigh Harbour, SVP of Business Development at the Rubicon Project, Peer39’s latest partner. The Rubicon Project and its technology services online content publishers, connecting them to its partners in demand channels, such as ad networks, exchanges, and DSPs, with pricing data to appropriately price impressions and audience data to make those impressions more valuable. “There are good ways and right ways to do things when it comes to targeting [to make ads more relevant for the user] and wrong ways,” he says. “We’re working towards putting in place the right structure, process and frameworks…to make this a value exchange.” And, he adds, he hopes the FTC and advocacy groups are thoughtful as they contemplate their options, “so as not to hinder a huge part of e-commerce and our economy.”

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AppNexus taps Peer39 for semantic targeting BizReport The company has tapped Peer39 for semantic technology and will integrate their targeting technology into the AppNexus platform. According to Peer39 their … and more »

Peer39, AdMeld partner for enhanced targeting BizReport … on our semantic technology which instantly understands the content and sentiment of web pages,” said Amiad Solomon, President and Founder of Peer39. …

Peer39 Appoints Andy Ellenthal as Chief Executive Officer Earthtimes (press release) Peer39 Labs conducts primary research in semantic web technologies resulting in a number of patents covering its technology and business practices. and more »