New Yorks’ Media Whiz advertising firm has acquired Cincinnati’s Text Link Ads. The deal was announced this morning, but the financial details aren’t being disclosed.
Text Link Ads typically sells small text ads for a fixed monthly rate, not pay per click. They advertise on blogs extensively (disclosure: including this one). The company recently released a product called “Feedvertising” that allows publishers to easily place ads from Text Link Ads, ads the publisher sells themselves directly or other messages into their RSS feeds. We use this service to promote other sites in the Crunch network. I hope that this product continues to flourish post acquisition.
Media Whiz was founded by Jason Cohen in 2001. The company offers lead generation, affiliate, display and email advertising services. It looks fairly old school to me and acquiring Text Link Ads is probably going to be a big step in moving into the emerging social media space. Jason Cohen’s previous company, Wise Ads New Media was acquired by About.com in 2000. Cohen began his career at DoubleClick. People talk about the power of PayPal alumni - I’d like to write a post about all the interesting things DoubleClick alumni are doing around the web, they’re everywhere.
There has been some amount of controversy around Text Link Ads because they don’t use javascript or “no follow” links to serve up ads on blogs and thus carry more weight with search engines than some people believe paid links ought to have. The Text Link Ads site is very clear that customers are buying inbound links and search engine weight, not just traffic. Some people contend that this is not a problem and that the more granular control over individual ads that Text Link Ads can offer its publishers by not using javascript is positive. Still others contend that “the link is dead” (perhaps because of things like links for sale) and all of this will be irrelevant soon.
Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads, tells us that this is just one of several acquisitions in the pipeline at Media Whiz. It looks like a smart one; look to start seeing the Media Whiz name more and more around the blogosphere.
Comments
We should see more consolidation in this Internet marleting space.
I never liked TLA. I don’t think Feedvertising will work.
This is great news for Text Link Ads. It also goes to prove the legitimacy of the Text Link space within online marketing.
You can read an interview with their founder over on CenterNetworks (who broke this story 2 hours ago, fyi)
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....extlinkads
Really hope things work out for the best with TLA. I love TLA as it is my primary means of getting in revenue for my blog so far.
Selling links for search engine benefit is a dangerous road to take. In addition, i believe that the only links that are scored by SE algorithms are aged links - links that have proven themselves to be non-temporal.
Of course people will always buy what you have to sell, and the benefit of being associated with other quality websites may be worth it. A lot of people have seen value from TLA so they should continue to be successful. Just don’t expect benefits in natural search engine listings.
Right now, search engines are factoring age into domain names, not individual links. Age-testing links will require another order of magnitude in processing power, so it’ll be a couple years before we need to worry about that.
Congrats to the TLA team!
You misspelled Cincinnati. Sorry, glaring mistake to an Ohioan.
Buying simple text links put off the content seems to be working well for many web sites on the web in the past years and it is great to hear that TLA grew up from link broker to a stable business which just got acquired, Congrats to the Patrick, yet there are sort of more pragmatic contextual approaches on the web presently, one of which seems to be http://linkedwords.com, which goes beyond simple text links and helps web sites link to each other for free on a content-area per content-area basis by using a precise contextual, grammatical and meaningful method that organizes the links within the content’s context, etc, etc…
I had great results with TLA. Hope things don’t get too mucked around with.
Congrats to Patrick and the crew.
I’m gonna have to take a look at this Text Link Ads stuff. Google Adsense is good, but maybe this can be added in addition?
It’s good seeing a guy like Patrick who I have seen around webmaster forums for about four years work hard on his idea and then get acquired. Well done mate!
to use this tla don´t give problems with google adsense??
Adsense is already having a problem with pay per lead PPL programs, and now here’s tla and feedvertising… but maybe competition may be healthy for Google Adsense…
yup. i already earn from TLA too. So far, its my side income every month. Anyway, TLA is great to me.
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