Henning Lange blog

Wow, what a headline on ARD, one of the largest tv-channels in Germany, regarding to my previous work. Is OnVista smarter than Google?

Hard to believe that OnVista could be smarter than Google with it’s hundreds of PhD’s. But still, Ligatus is a good niche approach connecting large marketers who are willing to pay a premium price to get high quantity of qualified traffic with leading publishers taking at least for the moment some butter of Google’s bread. It will be interesting to see how this story is continuing…

Do you know any other performance marketing approach outperforming AdSense?

Two months ago I left Ligatus. It wasn’t such an easy decision to leave our baby, especially when you have such a great team at your side. But it was time to move on.

The best thing is that friendships always last. Yesterday we met to celebrate our own X-Mas party visiting the Kölner Weihnachtsmarkt with lot’s of Glühwein, Kölsch and of course lot’s of fun.

And suddenly I got an awesome present - my own tipp-kick player Thanks so much, and bet I’ll train for our next match up

This summer I had the pleasure to meet Seth Goldstein discussing the future of lead based advertising and his ideas about Root Markets. I pretty much liked his mind shifting ideas although his concept behind was hard to understand.

As Pamela Parker of ClickZ puts it in her article following the lead to a more transparent future "Root Markets wants to do nothing less than marry the financial market with the Internet advertising market."

As the lead market is a high arbitrage business where publishers don’t know what their leads are worth, and consumers have little idea of what their data is worth to advertisers which face the problem to decide how much to pay for which lead, a transparent and liquid market is missing. That’s what Seth is up to:

"Our goal is to be a neutral, independent exchange where we try to get out of the way of the market participants. We want to provide some open market data and an environment in which people can compete and trade and do business under a level playing field. There’s no black box where we’re hiding performance data."

Another big thing about Root Markets is to empower users to control and handel their data via it’s non-profit AttentionTrust. Therefore, users can install a recorder which tracks everything they do with their browser. It both allows to turn of and deletion of data. As TechCrunch put’s it "you get two primary benefits - the ability to see your own data (see screen shot), and the ability to trade your data to other parties for some benefit - like more targeted advertising that you will actually find useful."

I like both ideas to create transparent markets and empowering consumers, but still believe it’s hard to revolutionize such a fragmented market with as many players as consumers, publishers, intermediaries, advertisers as well as investors.

All the best for you and your great team, Seth. I will stay watching