Grapeshot Raises $8.5M C Round For Its Hyper-Speed Keyword Targeting

AdTech has been lumbering along in the last few years, with a number of M&A moves to consolidate the market – not least the purchase by Verizon of AOL, allegedly (in the main) for its ad platform. The whole ad ‘auction’ on these platforms last 50 milliseconds, in the blink of the eye as the consumer loads the page. If the advertiser is an airline, it lets them exclude ads from pages where ‘aviation crash’, etc, is mentioned. As the Web dawned it sold its services directly to publishers, like MailOnline, who could then offer advertisers the ability to target their adverts to pages with certain keywords. Today, the CEO is John Snyder, who previously had a successful exit of the Muscat search business in 1997.