Ask.com will announce Monday the acquisition of nRelate, an early-stage content discovery company, to further its content marketing and recommendations strategy. The deal lays the foundation for new search-based monetization tools for publishers. The companies did not disclose the financial terms. The move sends Ask.com on a path to support the ability to create and share. Most loyal visitors to Ask.com's site not only ask and answer questions, but read and share related articles and content. nRelate's business model suggests content that complements what site visitors read -- not in the form of text links, but images in boxes at the end of the article linking to other content. One of the boxes could serve a paid advertisement, identified with an image and lowercase "i" in the right bottom corner, for companies like HGTV. The recommendation becomes automated, based on content on the site. nRelate will become an Ask.com division, headquartered in its New York offices. It will remain a separate product line. Today, a handful of employees support about 35,000 sites that publish content related to parenting, DIY, food and more. Ask's technology will integrate into nRelate's product, said Doug Leeds, Ask.com CEO, explaining how content discovery will become the next frontier in finding information. Search came first, followed by social integration. Now the site will recommend the next destination, even if that means taking the visitor to a related publisher's site or sponsor's brand page. "Search was the original method to determine what to see next and how to find the information, but social has become a way to recommend content," Leeds said. "We think content discovery automation on the publisher's Web site will become much bigger." More than 150 publishers sign up daily, supporting nRelate's 15% growth each month for the past year. The widget gets about a 6% click-through rate, compared with display ads that on average generate .09% CTR. "We're approaching 1 billion impressions of our widget per month," said Neil Mody, nRelate CEO, who will remain with the company. "We expect to grow to stratospheric proportions to serve the entire spectrum of publishing, from the big brand names to the bloggers." Heather Mann, founder of Dollar Store Crafts, publishes five do-it-yourself Web sites, using nRelate on all. Since implementing the technology about a year ago, she has seen click-through rates rise between 8% and 10%."It's a good way to introduce other content to readers, and I don't feel like I'm blasting my readers with unrelated content and advertising," she said. Brands have begun to create content to distribute their message through widgets. Ask wants to distribute content to the more than 65 million unique U.S. monthly visitors to the Q&A site. Venture capitalists and companies in aggregate have made more than $200 million in investments in this space during the last few months. Ask.com's parent company InterActiveCorp reported first-quarter 2012 revenue of $640.6 million, compared with analyst's expectation of $592.9 million. Based on reported earnings, Piper Jaffray analysts raised fiscal-year 2012 and 2013 revenue estimates by 6% each. In May, Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster wrote in a published report: "On search, the company expects flattish q/q top line growth through the rest of the year. We believe this may have caused some confusion from investors, but in terms of our expectations, the guidance suggests around 40% y/y growth in Q2 and around 30% in Q3, both higher than our expectations of in the 15-20% range."
Palo Alto-based PubMatic last week hired Bob Walczak as vice president. Walczak is an innovative mind in the mobile ad space, and will be working with PubMatic’s mobile and emerging media head Josh Wetzel. “We are pleased to bring a strategic thinker like Bob Walczak to this team,” said PubMatic President Kirk McDonald in a statement. “Bob has demonstrated the kind of insight and vision that aligns with our promise to meet the current needs to our publisher parterns.” Before joining PubMatic, Walczak was the Founder and CEO of Ringleader Digital. McDonald called Walczak’s Ringleader Digital a company that was “clearly ahead of its time [in 2005].” PubMatic helps publishers sell their ad inventory. Wetzel said in the statement, “He will help publishers in their quest to differentiate and monetize their exploding volume of mobile inventory.”
LinkedIn has begun testing display ads in its recently introduced iPad app, marking the professional network’s first step toward monetizing its rapidly growing mobile audience. LinkedIn is trialing the in-app ads with Cisco and Shell. Well received when launched in April, LinkedIn’s iPad app bears little resemblance to its Web site or smartphone apps. The design more closely mirrors that of personalized magazine apps like Flipboard, with slick graphics, a calendar widget and an “updates” page featuring a news digest of shared stories and status updates. Users can also swipe to access different sections. While LinkedIn provided few details about the ads it is testing, a screenshot of one of the new ads for Cisco shows what looks like a standard 300 x 250 unit on the right side of a user’s updates page. Like other companies such as Facebook, Pandora and Zynga, LinkedIn is scrambling to adapt its business model to catch up to a burgeoning user base on mobile devices. During the company’s first-quarter conference call in May, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said 22% of its visitors as of the end of March came from mobile devices, up from 8% a year ago. He also said the company was in the early stages of testing various forms of mobile monetization, suggesting LinkedIn would like to extend each of its revenue streams -- advertising, subscriptions, and fees for recruiting services—eventually to mobile. Weiner indicated that user engagement levels in both the company’s smartphone and iPad applications were high, a factor likely to interest advertisers. LinkedIn declined to say when advertising would be launched widely in the iPad app or what formats or type of pricing might be available. It’s also not clear when the company might begin running ads in its apps for the iPhone and Android devices, among other smartphone platforms. A study released Thursday by mobile ad network InMobi and mobile agency Mobext estimated there are 29.5 million tablet users in the U.S. or 11% of the total population. Among other findings, it said 60% of tablet owners spend 30 minutes each day browsing media content, and more than half (52%0) use a tablet to fill what otherwise would have been “dead time.” Among social networking properties, LinkedIn ranked third behind Facebook and Twitter across the mobile Web and apps as of March, with a U.S. audience of 7.6 million, representing 7.9% reach in the category, according to comScore. LinkedIn has more than 160 million registered users worldwide.