ValueClick

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

~ the obit ~

valueclick never reached turkey as a consumer brand at meaningful scale, because it was never meant to be a consumer brand. it was the backend, the kind of name that lived in publisher dashboards and affiliate sign-up pages, not on the pages it served ads to. if you ran a website in 2003 and you wanted to put banner ads on it for money, valueclick was one of the two or three networks you would consider. doubleclick was the bigger name. valueclick was the network that took smaller sites that doubleclick would not have signed.

brian coryat incorporated the company in 1997 in westlake village california, with the founding pitch being that publishers had unsold cpm inventory and advertisers had budget that wanted to be paid only on a click. the cost-per-click model was novel enough in 1998 that valueclick had a niche for itself for a couple of years. james zarley joined as ceo in 1999 and stayed in the chair for over a decade. the company ipo'd on nasdaq in 2000 a few weeks before the dot-com peak.

the 2000-2002 dot-com retreat hit ad networks hard. valueclick survived where most of the small ad networks did not, then used the cheap-stock years to do the roll-up. commission junction came in 2003. mediaplex came in. dotomi and greystripe and a couple of smaller assets followed through 2010. by 2011 valueclick was less an ad network and more a holding company for an ad-tech stack with multiple brand names under one ticker.

i saw banner ads served by valueclick on small forums in turkish dial-up culture in the early 2000s, the way you saw doubleclick everywhere. i never had a publisher account. by the time i was old enough to be the kind of person who would run a website with monetization, valueclick was no longer the network you would have picked, the ad-exchange real-time-bidding era had started and a different shape of company won that round.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it became ~

the rebrand was the cleanly-dead moment for the valueclick name. on 3 february 2014 the company announced it was renaming itself conversant inc, with all the subsidiary brands rolling under the new parent identity. the reasoning the company gave was that personalization had become the actual product and the ad-network framing was old. there was probably some truth to that. either way, the new conversant brand never had time to settle in. ten months later, on 10 december 2014, alliance data systems closed a 2.3 billion dollar acquisition of conversant and absorbed it into the epsilon marketing group.

the commission junction half of the stack survived inside epsilon under the name cj affiliate and is still operational as of this writing. the original valueclick ad-network business was wound into epsilon's larger digital marketing operation and lost its distinct shape over the next two years. the conversant name persisted on some product pages for a while and then quietly stopped appearing.

~ what got buried with it ~

the early-internet performance-marketing pattern that valueclick rode was a discrete period that ended around the time the company renamed itself. really though, the period from 1998 through about 2010 was when display advertising still ran through fixed-price contracts negotiated by humans and a handful of ad networks did the bookkeeping. doubleclick, valueclick, drivenetwork, burst media and a small handful of others controlled the inventory. by 2012 real-time bidding through ad exchanges had made all of that infrastructure look slow.

the rebrand-to-conversant moment was a network trying to reposition itself out of a category that was eating its margins. the ad-tech press at the time treated it as a sensible move that was probably about two years late. the alliance data acquisition ten months later closed the book on the standalone company. the valueclick brand became one of the names that an entire mid-2000s advertising stack used to be called.

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