Media6˚ Solves a Very Big Problem
I am excited to announce that Media6Degrees has joined the Venrock portfolio. News is here and the press release here.
Social networking is consuming a larger amount of our time spent online. Social media sites attract more than 650M visitors a month and drove more than 2.1 trillion page views last year. A substantial amount of social media ad inventory has gone unsold and, despite lots of trying, few companies have figured out how to use the data gathered by our social media browsing and deliver relevant ads based on it. When search exploded, it created huge ad inventory that was highly monetizeable, since search expresses intent on which ads can be precisely targeted. The growth in social media has largely failed to create a meaningful platform for advertisers to help monetize this creation, especially on a measured ROI basis. With so much more advertising going performance-based (as I have written about before), this problem is ripe for a technological solution.
Enter Media6Degrees, an impressive NYC advertising technology company. They have mapped the social graph (so far on the order of 80MM people) and provide major brand marketers with a way to reach scalable, highly targeted audiences. They are a behavioral targeting ad network, and use their understanding of the social graph to target not just people within target segments, but the people connected to those people who display high degrees of homophily, the tendency of like-minded individuals to cluster with other people who strongly resemble them.
The company is doing fantastically well and the CEO and Founder, Joe Doran, is a true thought-leader in the social media/behavioral targeting space and the ad tech ecosystem in general. I am proud to be associated with this company and its team and am honored to join my fellow investors from Coriolis Ventures, Contour Ventures, and USVP.
2 comments so far
Leave a reply
Congrats again – been waiting to see Pakman’s First Move, and so glad it is a NYC company too in an interesting space. And I learned a new word – homophily
Wonder what you think about deep data targeting – like Media6, Lotame, others – vs low level, age sex location, in that the former provides more discrete targets and better lift, but takes alot of crunching to do so, while the latter (ASL) is more efficient to organize.
Thanks for the support, Andy, as always. I have a pretty binary view about targeting in general; it either improves performance or it doesn’t. I believe all advertising will go performance-based, and therefore everything comes down to the ROI. If deep targeting produces better performance over ASL and the ROI makes sense, then it prospers. The money flows to those techniques with better performance and with scale. The latter is what makes Media6 so special — not only does the technology allow for precise segmenting, it is an audience expansion method to increase reach. Lots of other BT platforms have great targeting criteria but can’t get the reach.