Google has not wanted to roll-out human sales folks to pitch, explain and train the automated radio buying tools to advertisers and radio buyers, believing instead that the self-service tools will sell themselves and the buyers will just come. Google's 'product is king' philosophy is that sales people just pick up check and service customers, they are not really needed to generate the business, products do that. This has significantly suppressed the sales that the dMarc folks had expected to be able to generate.
Chad and Ryan Steelberg founded the company in 2002 and sold it to Google in February 2006 for 102 million in cash and up to $1.136 billion if certain performance goals were met. The problem was that dMarc could get only $200 million because of the low sales.
Google will continue to extend its offline advertising plans. "Google is committed to the audio business. We will continue to gather feedback during the Audio Ads beta test and are happy with the progress to date. We remain focused on delivering value to the radio industry as we continue to expand radio station inventory and enhance the product so that it's ready for all advertisers," said a Google spokesman.
It's unfortunate that not everyone who has hitched themselves to Google's rising star has profited as much as they'd like.
ReplyDeleteStill... 200 million? Quite the consolation prize.