Crowd Science Demographics is a new analytics service that builds detailed reports on the demographics and attitudes of website audiences.
By surveying a small number visitors with carefully constructed questionnaires, Crowd Science Demographics is able to build comprehensive profiles that give publishers a deep understanding of their audience.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this equals $$$ for you the publisher/blogger. The better understanding you have of your audience the better you can convey your niche audience to advertisers. This is not only a cool startup, but a truly value added service to the content publishing and blogging community.

“The company started out as a brand-monitoring service for PR and marketing types who want to keep track of everything being said about their brands, by whom, and how much power the people saying it have on the web. By choosing a set of keywords, users could see where the conversation around any topic started and how it spread.”

I posted about Lotame earlier in the year when they landed series B funding to the tune of $13 million from Emergence Capital, Battery Ventures and Hill Crest Management. Ironically, $13 million (a little more) is what Buzzlogic has been infused with over the last couple years from Adams Capital Management, Transcosmos and Ackerley Partners.

The big difference between Lotame and Buzzlogic is behavioral. Lotame focuses on what behavior a user conducts across one website or widget to the next, whereas Buzzlogic isolates bloggers with the most influence within a market niche and will match advertisers to the blogger for a premium.

Aside from being a very cool concept, there may be some real money to be made here for bloggers. At the very least it is a fresh alternative to adsense with a very unique monetary system….influence.

I find it interesting that several months ago I was prompted in my Google account with the following message:

I keep clicking the “remind me later” tab until I can figure out what the data will be used for. Clearly the data is being digested by Google’s new ad planner. As with all of Google’s services the amazing feature rich applications always come with the cost of privacy.

The service has launched free and will continue to build a test audience to further deploy the ad planner. It will likely be a free service for the long haul with subscription fees for more robust features.

It’s interesting to point out that Google is throwing its’ weight directly against long-time analytic competitors like Hitwise, Comscore and Nielsen Online. The Experian purchase of Hitwise for $250 million is looking pretty expensive with Google’s recent ad planner news.

Google continues to trump the advertising market and expanding into analytics is only one of many services the business will release. The current market share says it all:

In conclusion, Ad Planner appears to be an amazing service and should be a boon for the little guy and small businesses. Google proves once again, it will provide the tools neccessary for people to garner information and you certainly can’t be the price – FREE.

“Google’s deep pockets allow the company to create free offerings, such as Ad Planner, as a useful come-on to marketers to gain their ad business,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. “However, continued uncertainty about which company’s Web measurements are most accurate could get exacerbated—or clarified—by another analytics service.”

If anyone has used Google’s new ad planner service, please leave comments on your findings.

The top 10 Ad Focus properties also maintained their February rankings with Platform-A, the ad network combining Advertising.com, Tacoda, AOL, and Quigo, leading the ranking in March, reaching 91 percent of Americans online. interCLICK gained 9 spots in the ranking to position 14, reaching 58 percent of the 188 million Americans online. Real Cities Network and YuMe Video Network both entered this month’s rankings in positions 38 and 43, respectively.

The real question would be to rank the 50 advertising networks in terms of revenue rather than rankings.

The top 25 social media networks delivered over 155 million unique visitors in Feb. 2008 with 70 percent coming from MySpace, Facebook and Classmates.com. Add in YouTube and Flickr and you get another 60 million totaling an estimated 215 million humans viewing social media monthly.

Now imagine the the growing number of concentrated vertical networks in industries like healthcare, financial, beauty, business etc…The numbers are much smaller but the potency of advertising is much greater. The value of a 20,000 member social network on facelifts is greater to an advertiser than a 75,000 member general network.

Lotame closed a multi-million dollar series A deal led by Battery Ventures. Lotame is a social media aggregator that focuses exclusively on helping advertisers and publishers monetize the ad space/inventory available on social networks. Lotame keeps the consumer interests at heart as well. A statement from the press release gives a better summary:

Lotame is a company that focuses on providing the most advanced revenue solutions exclusively within social media. It aggregates intelligence across multiple social networking sites, which allows advertisers to build the most targeted and customizable audiences, and gives publishers the ability to monetize their inventory more effectively to garner higher streams of revenue.

Lotame is challenging the status quo online advertising networks (ironic, we use to say that about Madison Ave when referring to online advertising networks). This is very similar in concept to Facebook’s Beacon that serves advertising based on consumer interests and privacy tolerance. The key difference from Beacon is Lotame is not restricted to the Facebook community, rather it uses a cutting edge crowd-control technology to gather trends, interests and likes among numerous disparate social networks and utilizes the data to benefit the three stakeholders: Advertisers, Publishers and Consumers.

This could be a win-win if Lorame’s technology can place relevant audiences around user-generated content, you get the new triple play– advertisers (target the audience), Publishers (monetizing the audience) and consumers (willingly participate as the audience).

Satya Patel from Battery Ventures has some great statistics about the brand stickiness of social media and user-generated content for further discussion.

This space is gaining tremendous momentum in 2008 as discussed in previous posts.

According toemarketer

video and social networks are among the hottest new ad formats today, they will account for $2.9 billion, or about 10% of total online advertising dollars projected for 2008.

The total online media buy or ad spending accounts for $27.5 billion in 2008 with growth reaching $42 billion by 2011. If the same growth percentage held ground that would equal almost $11 billion for video and social advertising spending by 2011.

The difficultly of the new social web is tracking it. Coming up with better metrics in itself could be a great opportunity for startups. The trend will continue and the growth inevitable, a startup could benefit tremendously by arming businesses with better metrics, tracking and usability reports. The traditional tracking of page views and unique visitor is not enough in a world of social networks, RSS,instant messaging, widgets, cross platform pulling and pushing of data. Brand exposure becomes paramount when everything is repurposed. Emarketer also sited:

As Adam Gerber of Quantcast has said, in the future, online media buying will be about “the re-aggregation of a fragmented audience that’s actually watching different things.”

Plenty of companies are tracking clickstream, but with unhappy privacy results from users. The key is to balance privacy, user and advertiser relationships so it becomes a win-win. I think Facebook’s beacon will continue to take the brunt of the work and craft a model for social networks to follow. Let me know your thoughts on social advertising today and where you think it is headed.

According to sources gathered at VentureBeat

It is the third largest ad network, behind Google and Advertising.com, with over one billion page views a day across a network of 50,000 publishers. He says that AdBrite will use the funds to accelerate growth and expand the network’s targeting capabilities, including behavioral targeting.

Adbrite was an obvious acquisition target and now with Sequoia jumping in the game and stamp of approval, it is more a matter of when, not if.

What a tangled web we weave. The similarities that exist between the old synergy found in advertising firms, production companies and television networks of the late 90s and early 2000s (where I use to live and breathe) are now found in the current explosion of publishers, advertisers and online content. Startups or “migratory” businesses becoming a network or platform that facilitates publishing and advertising are potent forces. It is the sweet spot of choice and steadily becoming the cash cow of choice for big media.

Advertisers historically have always paid the bill for content regardless of the medium. Whether it be television, radio, print, online etc. The trend of online advertisings is irrefutable from past data and future data…take a quick peak.

If that is not a compelling enough reason to start a “MVN” startup then just take a quick look at the content trend. CBS has been gobbling up new media content companies by the dozens (just do a CBS search on this site for posts). Barry Diller is spinning IAC into a several properties and dealbook quoted “Web- and advertising-focused business that includes Ask.com and Match.com”. The M&A list is in orbit for 2007 in the web 2.0 world.

Where we thought there would be convergence, in fact is divergence. Where we thought would be Search and Social Networks are Vertical Search and Vertical Social Networks. The long-tail philosophy couldn’t be more proven then the current state of the Internet.

VentureBeat and Buzzmachine have some great fodder on this topic as well.

Let me here your thoughts on “Manged Vertical Network” startup challenges.