• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, November 2, 2005

Since its official debut last month, behavioral targeting company Tacoda has added about 200 Web sites--representing 10 million unique visitors--to its network, bringing the total reach of the network to 80 million consumers.

The company expects to continue adding between 10 million and 15 million a month for the next four to five months, said Tacoda CEO David Morgan.

Tacoda collects information from Web sites about visitors' surfing habits, then sends visitors display ads based on that data. For instance, a visitor who goes to Technorati and searches for technology blogs might be tagged as a potential hybrid car purchaser because, Morgan said, readers of tech blogs are more likely than average to purchase hybrid cars. Tacoda then might serve that person an ad for a hybrid car at other sites within Tacoda's network that have available inventory.

Some sites, such as Technorati--which joined in the last month--just provide data about consumers, while others also serve ads. Morgan estimates that about 20 percent of the 1,000 Web sites within the network just provide information about consumers.

All publisher sites that provide the data Tacoda uses to determine which ads to display to which visitors are compensated for that information, Morgan said. "We track every single data point from every page view on every publisher," he said, adding that it took about 18 months to build the network architecture.

Other new Web sites to join include Primedia Outdoors Online, CarDomain, and New Digital Group (a network college newspaper site). Traditional newspaper publishers have been somewhat reluctant to join the network. So far, only about half of the newspaper publishers that Tacoda provides behavioral targeting to on a site-by-site basis have joined, Morgan said. "These tend to be very conservative companies," Morgan said.

In the last month, Tacoda also has signed around 40 advertisers, bringing the network's total to around 60, Morgan said.