AdBrite Raises $23 Million More – Why?

The big news today in the venture capital space is AdBrite raising a new round of $23 million reports PE Hub. Om also believes there is more coming within the round.

Looks like the majority of the bloggers listed on Techmeme just reported on the funding. Allow me to give you my current thoughts on AdBrite. AdBrite has a few large publishers but outside of that, the market is made up of very small players. AdBrite has a different model than most ad networks. A publisher places the tracking code on their site and then that reports numbers back to AdBrite who then lists you on their site for advertisers to buy ads on.

The issue with this is that many of the sites listed have close to no traffic and therefore get no real visibility and very few sales. Smaller sites are better off sticking with Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network in my opinion. When I tried it with one of my other sites years ago, it never worked out as I received one tiny sale. Yet I was able to bring in more revenue on the same placements with "traditional" ad networks so I gave up.

In fact, What’s really funny to me is that the "featured sites" haven’t changed in over a year – there is a very small rotation of them including: Ebaums World, Tickle, Putfile and Friendster. If AdBrite really wanted to build a community, they would rotate those a lot more and show off some of the smaller sites. Of course the smaller sites make nothing for AdBrite so I understand why they show the big ones all the time. If they pimped the small sites within AdBrite, perhaps they could move them to less-small and then to larger which could only help AdBrite.

They also miss the current thought that "social" online advertising is not just about "pageviews" anymore. It’s about buying a presence on sites that you want to be affiliated with no matter the traffic. AdBrite began when pageviews alone were the way advertisers selected sites.

And as I noted in my previous post about AdBrite, when I tried advertising with them about a year ago, I found the process difficult. They emailed me to say it’s upgraded now but I haven’t tried it since then.

I am not sure what the new funding round will be used for but my suggestion would be to focus on creating forward-thinking online advertising models. Shouldn’t an ad network be self-sustaining for the most part (except perhaps in major expansion periods)?

When AdBrite first began operations, I was very excited to use the service and thought it had great potential. As it seems the CEO has great influence in the community, perhaps it can get back to building that potential in the near future. I might even be interested in testing it out again in the future.