Kanoodle

» see kanoodle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Around 2004 and 2005 every forum I read had a thread about AdSense. Donanimhaber and frmtr were full of people working out what a click was actually worth and whether the box could be moved higher up the page without getting the account banned. That was the atmosphere Kanoodle walked into. Google had made a market and then priced it alone, and for about two years it looked like somebody else might get a share.

Kanoodle was never going to be the answer for anyone I knew. It wanted American publishers with American traffic, because its advertisers were buying American clicks, and a Turkish-language forum had nothing it could sell. The conversation about alternatives was real everywhere on the web. The alternatives themselves were regional.

The company started in October 1999 in Getzville, New York, outside Buffalo, founded by Kent Keating. For its first years it was a paid search business, a smaller version of what Overture was doing: advertisers bid on keywords, and the results were syndicated out to search boxes on other people's sites. By 2003 that was a crowded trade and getting worse, since Overture itself was about to be swallowed by Yahoo and Google was building the same business in-house.

In January 2004 it started placing content-targeted links, with CBS MarketWatch as the first publisher of any size. That October it launched BrightAds as a self-serve program, which meant a small site could sign up and paste a snippet exactly the way AdSense worked. The technical difference it advertised was that it mapped ads to a page's topic rather than to keywords found on it, on the argument that keyword matching produced the well-known failures where a story about a crash pulled airline ads. The commercial difference, which mattered more, was that BrightAds accepted adult-oriented inventory Google would not.

~ the record ~

~ how the money worked ~

At its height the network was genuinely large. Kanoodle claimed more than a thousand sites and 141 million unique visitors a month, with premium publishers on the list including CNN.com and USAToday. That is not a fringe operation. It is a real second place in a market that only ever paid for first.

The corporate structure then got complicated in the way that usually signals a company hedging. A parent called Seevast Corp was put over the top, with Kanoodle as the search marketing side and a unit named Syndigo building white-label ad networks for other companies. In August 2006 the contextual product was renamed Pulse 360, and from that point the Kanoodle name slowly stopped appearing on anything a customer would see. The rename is where this grave really starts.

After that came the compliance years, which is what an ad network does once growth is over. It passed an IAB click measurement audit in December 2009 and joined the NAI code of conduct in April 2011. It added retargeting that same summer, several years after retargeting had become the thing everyone else was already selling.

~ the day it died ~

In April 2013 Pulse 360 laid off the company. There had been about 75 people. It started looking for a buyer or an investor, which at that stage of an ad network's life is a formality, and the traffic tells the story faster than the press coverage does: 124.7 million views in January, 19.2 million by March.

Then M&T Bank terminated the line of credit and seized the accounts the business needed to operate. Publishers were owed money and did not get it. When AdExchanger called for comment in May, Kent Keating, who had started the company fourteen years earlier, did not respond, and there was never a shutdown announcement of any kind. The network simply stopped serving.

The domain is still registered. Load kanoodle.com today and it renders a frameset, an actual HTML frameset in 2026, pointing at a Shopify storefront selling Christmas cheese. That is the whole ending. A company that once decided which advertisement 141 million people saw is now one frame tag redirecting to a gift basket.

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