Tacoda Nabs Grey Lady

Tacoda Systems this morning said it will provide behavioral targeting services for The New York Times Company's family of Web sites, including NYTimes.com, the largest newspaper Web site in the world; Boston.com, which carries stories from The Boston Globe; and the Regional Media Group Web sites.

"Arguably, the most important news site in the world has chosen our solution," said Dave Morgan, CEO of Tacoda Systems.

Within the last year, most of the major online newspaper sites have signed with either Tacoda or Revenue Science, the two major players in the behavioral targeting space. Of all online newspapers, NYTimes.com is the biggest, with 12 million monthly unique visitors, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Behavioral targeting systems such as Tacoda's combine demographic and user behavior data, enabling marketers to send ads to the users considered most likely to purchase their products.

Jason Krebs, vice president sales and marketing, NYTimes.com, said the Times values behavioral targeting because it "allows agencies in this day and age of accountability to further prove to clients that they are reaching the most relevant targets for their goods and services."

Before tapping Tacoda, NYTimes.com used its own in-house behavioral targeting system to deliver audience segments to advertisers. One of the main reasons the company decided to shift to Tacoda was the company's new audience classification standard, called Tacoda Targets, said Krebs. "It allows the product offerings we developed years ago to be standardized," he said.

What's more, said Krebs, outsourcing behavioral targeting to Tacoda will enable NYTimes.com to focus on developing technologies and services. "You can't get a macro focus when you're trying to do a hundred different things."

Morgan added that the migration of NYTimes.com to a commercial system mirrors the path many Web publishers took with in-house ad serving: they initially did their own serving, but later found it more efficient to hire third parties.

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