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Start-ups try to cut slice of Google pie
Capitalising on search-ad market

By Stefanie Olsen

Published: Wednesday 30 July 2008

Google wouldn't be Google without its ownership of the estimated $10.4bn annual search advertising market. But other ad-technology hopefuls are still angling for ways to take a few dollars off the top for themselves - just like Microsoft and Yahoo!.

For example, New York-based Clickable is trying to build a lucrative business by selling advertisers a simple software tool to manage and improve their search-marketing campaigns with Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Because it can be tricky and time-consuming for advertisers to keep track of multiple search campaigns, Clickable lures them with a self-described iTunes-like application that shows which ads are working and which aren't.

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Since the company's launch in February 2006 it has attracted about 400 customers, which spend an average of $10,000 to $50,000 per month on search ad campaigns.

Clickable will announce today it has raised $14.5m in a Series B round of financing from the Founder's Fund, as well as its previous investors Union Square Ventures and FirstMark Capital. With this financing, the company has raised a total of $22.5m in the last year, including money from private investors former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and managing partner of the Founders Fund.

Clickable CEO David Kidder said that part of the growth plan in the next year will be to create a single "Clickable" interface for other types of web advertising, including social media and display ads. Because the Founder's Fund is an investor, Kidder said Clickable will be looking to create tools for many of the venture firm's other portfolio companies, such as Facebook or Twitter.

Advertisers on social networks, he said, could eventually benefit from a single tool that could trace how ads are performing with other types of media. "Once social media can get connected to search, even to Google, advertisers can create a display ad campaign in Facebook and MySpace and connect that to a search campaign that converts [into a sale or action]," Kidder said.