FlyCast no fish outta water
FlyCast Communications Corp., a startup Web advertising network, plans to unveil new features for its ad buyers and sellers Monday. But in the overheated Web ad market, the real news may be just that it has survived so far.
San Francisco-based FlyCast, which launched its service in May, uses an auction-based system for buying and selling ads. At the time of its launch, it faced aggressive competition on two fronts -- from better-established ad vendors such as DoubleClick Inc., and from other startups built around similar systems, such as Narrowline Inc., and ADSmart Corp., an affiliate of the Lycos search engine.
But FlyCast says that in six months, it has signed up more than 300 Web sites and around 200 buyers, including such well-known companies as Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com, Disney, and Infoseek Corp.
"It's been a very strong period since May," crowed FlyCast CEO Miles Walsh.
Industry watchers believe Internet advertising will be a boom market. Forrester Research Inc. predicts Internet ad spending will rise from $400 million this year to nearly $4.8 billion in 2000 -- still only a fraction of total ad spending.
FlyCast's auction-based method is an innovation in the field, but hasn't yet proven it can be successful; besides FlyCast's direct competitors, it has to overcome the advertising industry's reluctance to buy ads in a new and unfamiliar way.
The company's new client software is clearly aimed at making the process easier for buyers. It has ported from a Windows 95 client to Java, which will allow its newly-integrated Marimba Castanet push technology to automatically upgrade the client as new versions come out.
"We're driving toward a true Web-based, realtime sort of model," Walsh said.
FlyCast also introduced a higher degree of automation for its Web site clients. A database will now allow sites to automatically refuse ads from specific companies, or refuse ads for specific products from a company while accepting ads for the company's other products.