AdNetworker

According to ecorazzi, as of March 31, 2010, Gaiam has announced that they’ve closed their green LIME ad network. Gaiam acquired LIME in 2007, which at the time was majority owned by AOL founder Steve Case.  In May 2007, they launched the first ad network dedicated to green living and the LOHAS movement.  After digging around, it does appear they still have a LIME Ad Network website still online, perhaps this will be taken down shortly.

According to their site, they describe themselves as:

The LIME Network is a collection of websites and blogs each have their own established audience and voice; all which keep in line with LIME’s brand and mission.

The LIME Ad Network helped green advertisers reach green websites.  At one point, LIME Ad Network was the leading green ad network.

Gaiam is also shutting down Gaia.com, a fourt year old social networking site.  As their site says “Thought its been an incredible four years, due to current economic conditions, Gaia Community has become simply too much to support.  As of the end of this month, I’ll be leaving, off to an overdue break, a new business venture, and a few adventures abroad, and the site will be shutting down”

The green vertical should be a strong ad network vertical, so this is a surprising outcome.  Based on the public statement by Gaiam, perhaps focus was more of an issue than the economy and the vertical.  A few remaining green networks include Matter Network, SustainLane and Natural Path Media.

The Yahoo Publisher Network Online (YPNO) is shutting down effective April 30, 2010.  YPNO is equivalent to Google’s AdSense network, direct towards the smaller long tail non-premium publishers.  Sources at Yahoo have said that they will continue to serve ads to their premium publishers.

In an email sent to the Yahoo publishers, Yahoo referred the publishers to join Chitika for continued ad revenue. In their email they told publishers:

Because our content will no longer be delivered to your ad unit spaces after April 30, 2010, we recommend removing all YPN ad code from your pages by that date (April 30, 2010).

This is a very interesting decision by Yahoo to shut down YPNO (their AdSense clone) directed towards the long tail non-premium publishers, just months after announcing to shut down the Right Media DMX (Direct Media Exchange) Platform, which was also directed towards the long tail non-premium publishers.

After a rapid land grab for Ad Networks market share in 2007, Yahoo acquired Right Media for $680MM in attempts to compete with Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick and Microsoft’s $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive, only to shut down DMX and now YPNO just three years later!

Some are speculating that Google’s continued success with AdSense has caused Yahoo to concede in the land grab for ad network market share, but its my belief that the 300 to 400 more cost efficiently run ad networks is causing the pain for Yahoo.

More than 60 ad networks have raised $1.5 billion in the past six years, which include vertical ad networks, video, brand, performance, wireless, gaming, behavioral, contextual, etc.  The top 25 ad networks have raised $1.2 billion of that total amount according to VentureSource.  A lot of folks have predicted that there would be a consolidation and shakeout in the ad network industry (and there’s been some), but few have predicted trouble for companies like Yahoo.  Perhaps this recession has pushed advertisers to tighten their budgets, seeking lower CPM’s and the smaller ad networks with lower overhead have been able to provide this to them.  It will be interesting to see how this continues to shakeout over the next 12 months.  I cannot imagine Yahoo staying away from the long tail non-premium publisher market for long…