Tumri gives you more control over ad widgets

May 7, 2007 | Michael Foroobar | Comments | |

tumrilogo.jpgTumri, an online ad network, today releases a service called Tumri Publisher to give publishers more control over ads displayed on their site.

Tumri Publisher allows users to create custom, branded ads called AdPods based on product category. For example, a blog about books could choose to only display book ads from Amazon.com. It also lets you create AdPods for specific merchants and price ranges.

AdPods display inventory from over one thousand merchants including Shopping.com and Overstock. Unlike some competitors, Tumri allows publishers to set specific rules about the types of ads they wish to display. For instance, Google AdSense lets you filter out specific competitors or advertisers but currently has no way to specify ads you’d like to include. Google has recently started testing “gadget ads” (see Niall Kennedy’s piece), but these don’t appear to give publishers as much control. There are several other ad widget companies, such as the less developed Boobox, doing something similar. Zlio, more advanced, also lets you make money from selling products through widget stores (our coverage here).

Tumri’s ads — such as the ones below — look more like product offers than contextual advertising. Tumri allows publishers to control ad look and feel and monitor performance of different types of ads. Lack of creative and editorial control is a drawback to popular solutions such as Google AdSense.

Tumri, based in Mountain View, gives publishers a 50 percent split of revenue it gets from advertisers. Publishers may make money if a customer clicks on an ad or, in other cases, only if they actually buy the product, depending on the arrangement (see how it works). The three-year old company has raised $6.5 million in a first round of financing from Shasta Ventures and Accel Partners.

tumricolor.jpg

Next Story: Lung-device maker Pulmonx draws in $20M
Previous Story: Carbonite, online backup company, raises $15M

Bookmark and Share

Tags: , , ,

Photo of Michael Foroobar

About the Author, Michael Foroobar

  • Talk about a case of "Back to the Future", back in 1997 a company called Impulse! Buy Network was built on this very premise. It was sold to Inktomi in April of '99 for $115M, which at the time provided Softbank Ventures (Mobius) w/the best ROI of their portfolio for that year. It was before the term widgets was in vogue and these ads were called "barkers". Yahoo!, AOL, ComputerShopper, Disney's GO Network, AT&T Worldnet, and a host of other major portals were affiliates and displayed these product driven ads targeted to whatever section on their web site they were placed (ie. sports products targeted to sports content on the portal). Yes, contextual ad targeting before Google had released AdSense.

    This was a merchandising network, with such merchants as J.Crew, K-mart, and over 200 others feeding product offers into the network. These product offers could also be paired up w/such selling methods as "falling price offer", "auction", "limited time offer", and so on.

    Anyway, Inktomi ended up combining Impulse! w/their C2B acquisition (a competitor to MySimon and Junglee at the time) of an early comparison shopping engine. This made tons of sense because if you consider, having products in a comparison shopping engine or as product offers on widgets, these are simply applications of a product database. Hmmm...I wonder if a similar fate awaits these latest entrants?

    Funny to see these apps coming back strong. I should also note that at that time Accel passed on investing in the company, so I'm guessing this time around they didn't want to miss it again ;)
  • Great to see someone giving google a run for their money! Roll on the competition!
    www.thesecretsofvisualization.com/rights
  • Yan
    All these widgets lack an important functionality that made Google Adsense successful -- contextual sensitivity. Widgets that need to be configured for each page are doomed to fail because of the maintenance effort they require
  • LEE
    Great article!
    I should see it earlier.