Archive for October, 2011
Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard about the recent acquisition of Lijit by Federated Media Publishing. What you may not have known, is that we were still cranking out new software updates and features throughout the acquisition process. We were able to introduce a lot of new functionality that helps our publishers better understand their audience, and manage their business.
New Notifications System
We believe that communication is key to ensuring our publishers can easily stay on top of what is happening on their publication and everything Lijit is doing to make you succesful. We’ve just made it easier with the new notifications system we’re rolling out today. Any publisher using our ad services will get alerts whenever there are significant changes to how Lijit is optimizing ad campaigns for them. If we add new campaigns, or update targeting or frequency capping rules, you’ll know about it. If you really want to stay on top of everything we’re doing , you can even subscribe to get email alerts whenever new optimization alerts appear. Check out your Lijit dashboard to see it in action.
More Audience Stats
Many audience stats were previously limited to Lijit publishers using our Analytics and Search tools. We’ve been slowly adding audience data to our dashboard for Lijit Ads publishers, and now we offer even more. Publishers using our ad services will see a new tab in their Lijit dashboard called “Audience”. We’re now providing data on what sites are driving traffic to your website. As we compile more data , we’ll continue to add more metrics to this dashboard to empower publishers with data they can use to better understand and engage their audiences.
Bigger and Better
Our advertising services and reader engagement tool usage is growing at an incredible pace. While we’re rolling out cool new features and functionality, we’ve also been scaling our platform to handle our meteoric growth. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve added new Lijit infrastructure in 4 cities in the U.S, and 1 in Western Europe. We’ll continue to add more as we grow to ensure every interaction your readers have with Lijit is fast and reliable.
More to Come
We’re rolling out more exciting features in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for your weekly stats email from Lijit for a sneak preview of what we are planning…
Employees, investors, and friends of Lijit recently celebrated our acquisition by Federated Media with a party at one of Boulder’s newest restaurants, The Kitchen [Next Door]. The restaurant is one of downtown Boulder’s latest additions, serving as a more casual take on the farm-to-table concept that has made its sister restaurant, The Kitchen, a Boulder hot-spot for many years.
The Lijit team loves a good party and in true Lijit fashion we did it up right! On the day we announced the acquisition, our CEO Todd Vernon proclaimed it a “Major Martini Day” and we doctored up a poster in his honor. Check out some of the photos below to get a glimpse of our celebration…
Tags: events, Lijit employees, Todd Vernon | View Comments
Today Lijit announced that it has been acquired by Federated Media Publishing, the powerhouse conversational marketing and media business that John Battelle started in 2005. I could not be more excited about the transaction, and more importantly, the future that the combined company has before it.
About the same time John was starting FM, I was starting Lijit. Not in a friend’s garage, like John, but rather in my basement.
From the onset, Lijit has been keenly interested in helping publishers who create and curate great content that attracts engaged audiences in thoughtful conversations. In the early days we borrowed heavily from the FeedBurner playbook: provide services that are useful and intuitive and create long lasting publisher relationships. Dick Costolo, the former FeedBurner CEO and now CEO of Twitter, was an early mentor and board member who helped me keep the Lijit mission true to course in an industry where data is hard to come by and experience is everything. Over the last few years we expanded that charter to focus on helping publishers monetize their website(s) and bring them technologies and information that would otherwise be out of reach due to their size.
For all this hard work, publishers have rewarded us by trusting more of their ad inventory to us and allowing us to help monetize more of their properties. September was the first month since inception that we paid out more than $1M in revenue to publishers in our network. Even more exciting is that this number has grown over 50% month-over-month for the last year or so. While revenue is the key metric of success for any business, it is still amazing to see the number of positive tweets, inbound emails, and phone calls we get every week from publishers who are too small or too niche to be considered viable by the larger ad channels in our industry. We love publishers and they are our people.
So in May, when we were first approached by Federated Media, it was a case of mixed emotion. Lijit wasn’t for sale, we were fully funded and coming off our 6th straight month of 50% month-over-month revenue growth. Profitability was within sight and occurring on and off on a daily basis. In short, we were having FUN, AND A LOT OF IT. But, at the same time, if there was bigger play to make – an industry changing and industry leading play to make – it was with FM. It all made complete sense from that first instant of thought.
Lijit has one of the best management teams I have ever worked with. Without fail they embody the charter of “hire people that are smarter than you.” This motto has served me well as Lijit CEO, and I am super excited to see what they can accomplish with greater resources and the association with an A+ brand in our industry.
Over the months as I got to know John Battelle, Deanna Brown and the entire FM management team it become even more clear that the combination of both companies was going to create the first major media company designed from the ground up to help the millions of publishers ignored by all the other companies. This company was designed to harness the amazing power of focused conversations in the engaged part of the web – what FM refers to as the “Independent Web.”
FM and Lijit are going to combine efforts to create a company of scale and substance only indicative of industry leading companies. I could not be more excited for the ride.
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