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Tacoda, an advertising network known for its relatively high rates that was recently bought by AOL, is being shutdown. Even worse, this respected “remnant” will be folded into AOL’s Advertising.com/ Platform-A division.

A letter was sent out by Tacoda on August 1 informing publishers that they will have to sign new contracts and change tags on their sites. Matt Marshall has a copy of the AOL letter to Tacoda customers on VentureBeat. For many publishers who choose to re-up their contract they will see their cost per thousand of $2 to $6 drop to $1 or less.

“TACODA Is in the process of integrating its publisher solutions into AOL’s Platform-A as part of one of the industry’s most comprehensive suite of monetization opportunities for publishers.”

Re-signing will also be seen by many as “slumming it” compared to the higher quality advertisers Tacoda was able to maintain because of their behavioral targeting technology. For those advertisers who choose to continue with Advertising.com, there is not clear indication as to how or what sort of targeting will be offered.

“As part of this process TACODA is changing the contractual relationship for both Data and Inventory monetization.  Next week, you will receive a new Data agreement from TACODA which must be signed by August 31st. There are no Data tagging changes required to remain a behavioral data provider.”

It is because of the behavioral targeting Tacoda offered that advertisers were willing to pony up more money on a CPM basis.

I’d be curious to know how this affects both advertisers and publishers, and whether you plan on re-upping with AOL regardless of these changes.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Advertising, Marketing, Media, Technology, Web / Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.