Advertising technology company iWeb has closed an equity investment of $8.6 million, led by Israel-based Apex Partners.
Other funding participants included the ICE group, individual partners from Hellman & Friedman, LLC, and Young & Rubicam, the well-known ad agency that led iWeb’s initial funding round.
IWeb’s offers iNotes, a technology that’s licensed to ISP’s and Web sites. These companies use the software to deliver targeted messages and advertisements directly to consumers, regardless of what’s on the page. INotes has the added bonus of easy deployment — no downloads or installation of client software is required.
How does it work? A banner-size box that contains media content –including news, sports, messages from the ISP, advertisements, and even personalized content — periodically drops down from the top of the user’s screen. Users can choose content that they want to see, and can control the iNote window by allowing it to continue, pausing it for further viewing, browsing within the iNote, or hiding it for later.
IWeb has relationships with DoubleClick and 24/7 Media to sell the iNote product to ISPs and Web sites. The two ad agencies will take a share of the direct sale. IWeb licenses out their product for free and splits the ad revenue with the ISP or Web site, which provides the main stream for iWeb’s cash flow.
ISP’s who use iNotes can target ads through the current methods, personal profiling, personalized content, and a record of URL’s to determine what a consumer is viewing. All ad content is sold by DoubleClick and 24/7 along with the iWeb product.
The technology company began in Israel, before moving to New York and now has sales offices in Europe, Latin America, Israel and the Asia-Pacific region.
John Kelly, the director of marketing for iWeb said the funding money will be spent aggressively to hunt down sales, and for company expansion. IWeb currently has about 60 employees.
Kelly said the ISP market is looking for money-saving ideas and low-cost solutions, and that the iWeb product gives ISPs the added bonus of generating revenue through ad sales.
According to Kelly, iNotes generates click-through rates that are ten times higher than the average click-through for banner ads, which hovers somewhere below .5 percent.
