Google’s acquisition of display advertising startup Teracent yesterday had significant meaning for rival Tumri; the San Mateo-based advertising platform now counts tech giant Google as a competitor. Tumri, which launched in 2004, provides a similar advertising technology to Teracent. The startup’s product, the AdPod, creates display ads that are customized in realtime to the specific consumer and site.
Tumri’s dynamic ad platform is optimized at the creative level to enable advertisers to change the animation, background template, featured product, headline, image, and more dynamically based on who is viewing the ad and where the individual is viewing the ad from geographically.
Ever since Google options finished vesting, people have been wondering what will become of the Xooglers after they take their money and jump into something new. Google’s former Product Management Director for AdSense, Gokul Rajaram has decided to take a position on the board of Tumri, a display advertising startup that delivers dynamically targeted ads.
Rajaram served at Google from January 2003 to November 2007 and played a major role in developing AdSense in early 2003 and on. According to his bio:
He also helped drive a number of Google’s acquisitions, including DoubleClick, AdScape, and dMarc. Earlier in his career, Rajaram worked as a technical architect at Juno Online, where he developed the back-end advertising system that drove much of Juno’s revenues and helped it go public in 1999. Rajaram has an M.B.A. from MIT Sloan, a M.S. in Computer Science from UT Austin, and a BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur where he received the President’s Gold Medal for being Class Valedictorian.
No doubt Tumri is excited to have him on board. Their current products include Adpod and Publisher, which let website owners pair relevant offers with their content. Rajaram’s experience at Google couldn’t be more relevant.
Widgets are being turned into advertising delivery systems. Their nature – rich media applicatons that are easy to build, customize and add to a site – also make them an attractive way to add advertising to small sites. Google is now testing gadget ads, and we’ve written about services like boobox and AuctionAds (a sponsor) that easily ad affiliate advertising to a site via widgets. Last week eBay also launched “to go” widgets that let publishers embed ebay listings into websites, although for now there are no affiliate payments tied to those widgets.
Two more are coming this week. Tonight Silicon Valley-based Tumri is announcing a new product called Tumri Publisher, and Seattle’s Mpire will announce an advertising widget later this week.
Tumri Publisher, which is described here, allows users to create highly customizable widgets that promote specific products on their websites, in exchange for an affiliate or other fee. Tumri has twenty or so direct relationships with ecommerce sites like Overstock, Walmart, Shop.com and others to promote their products. Most advertising pay on a purchase, although at least one partner pays a on each click to their website.
Tumri splits revenue from the advertising 50/50 with advertising, and they say they’ll pay up to 70% of proceeds to larger publishers.
The widgets are javascript powered; the company says Flash versions are coming soon.
Tumri was founded in 2004 and has raised $6.5 million in a Series A round of financing from Shasta Ventures and Accel. They are currently closing a second round. They have 31 employees (16 in India, 15 in Silicon Valley).
