TechCrunch 40: Revenue models and analytics
Five companies presented beta software in the category of revenue models and analytics at TechCrunch 40. Among the five GotStatus was the only product with an IT focus. Spott, Clickable and Pubmatic were ad-centric, and ZocDoc finds open appointments on doctor and dentist schedules.
GotStatus is a hosted service that monitors servers running Web sites and applications, a Google Analytics for the servers that can track disk space, database size, CPU utilization, email traffic flow and other metrics. Developers can add Javascript snippets to their servers and create widgets embeddable on Web pages. The snippets can be sourced from the developer community or they can be written using the GotStatus API. GotStatus is applying a utility pricing model--you pay by the drink. The service is free with 2000 data points per day an 1GB storage. An additional 1000 data point per day is $1 per month, and an additional 1GB at $1 per month.
It's not clear how ZocDoc ended up in the revenue model and analytics category. It is a service for making doctor or dentist appointments the digital way, finding open appointment times on practitioners' schedules who have joined the network. It has the usual rating, maps and even search restricted by insurance type. For starters, ZocDoc has cataloged 2 percent of the dentists in Manhattan. It's a useful site for emergencies, but very occasional use won't turn ZocDoc into a success. It may turn out that the ratings and comments on doctors make the site most useful.
Spottt (yes, three ts) showed that the LinkExchange idea is not dead. Spottt has set up a cashless one-for-one ad swap among members of 125x125 ads, which must be displayed above the fold. Members swap ads with people who have site in similar categories, and the ads are manually reviewed by Spottt, which comes out of AdBrite, the four-year-old ad marketplace.
Clickable showed a comprehensive dashboard and set of tools for creating, managing and analyzing online ad programs. The software is proactive, identifying ways to improves ad performance--such as increasing keyword pricing, changing the text of ads or across various ad networks. "We force best practices on ad spends," said David Kidder, CEO of Clickable. The company is funded by Union Square Ventures and Pequot Ventures.
PubMatic introduced a service for automating and optimizing ad serving decisions. PubMatic covers ad networks, such as Google AdSense, ValueClick, BlueLithium and Yahoo! Publisher Network and shifts ads to the best performing network and track revenue, impressions and other metrics for publishers.