AOL Buys Tacoda – some thoughts on why

The NY Post breaks the news that AOL has bought Tacoda, the leading behavioral targeting ad network. I wrote a guest piece on Venturebeat that went up last night about vertically targeted content sites and how they can add value to both synthetic channels and behavioral networks, topics I have blogged about here in the past.

AOL has made a lot of very interesting advertising acquisitions recently, starting with Advertising.com a few years ago, and more recently Third Screen Media, Adtech AG, Lightning Cast and now Tacoda (and excluding their attempt to buy Tradedoubler). This is why I commented on Yahoo’s acquisition of Right Media that they were not following Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick, but rather following AOL. All portals are losing market share of pageviews and need to increase their reach offsite to maintain their advertising effectiveness. Congrats to Mike Kelly, Jorge Espinel and the team