Wal-Mart Acquires OnRiot For Social Media Sites

Wal-Mart Supercenter Torreon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

OneRiot is a social and mobile ad targeting startup now owned by Walmart.   While the financial terms of the acquisition have not been revealed, the startup is joining with Wal-mart Labs.
OnRiot has changes its model of doing business, by closing down the search portal that used real-time and now monetizes exclusively through the use of real time advertising.  The startup has also moved to provide a service targeting social services using apps with embedded mobile ads.

OneRiot first made its peak into the world of advertising during 2009 with the introduction of RiotWise.  This ad format placed the emphasized content into position using the real-time feed.  Later they introduced Trending adds by RiotWise.  These streaming adds correspond to the topics that are trending in the user's social web.  They are self refreshing and a self service edition of RiotWise.

Today, OneRiot provides opportunities for advertisers to target segments of their audience on mobile devices.  This allows targeting for busy moms, techies, sports fans and fashionistas.  Use of targeting and segmentation allows the advertisers to focus on the interest profiles of their audience, conversations and social influences.  The audience profiles of OneRiot are created through mining as well as analysis of public social streams such as Twitter.

The capability for this style of data mining was the attraction for Wal-mart to Onriot.  Walmart has announced that OneRiot has developed useful technology that can help advertisers make the most of Facebook and Twitter.  The ads displayed are customized to interest of customers.

Wal-mart seems to have made interesting investments in the areas of social media, mobile devices and targeted spaces.  Earlier in year, they acquired Kosmix.  This company also joined Walmart Labs, and is now integrating the technology into both the mobile and online offerings of the company in sites such as Facebook, the e-commerce website and other places on the web.

Related articles

• How To Make A Good Advertisement Of Your Product
• Twitter Follows LinkedIn, Facebook and Google With Ad API

Google: Behind the Numbers

It would probably come as no surprise to learn that Google’s annual revenue increases each year and arguably the most popular site on the internet. In 2010, Google’s revenue was more than $29 billion. One would have to combine the GDPs of the world’s 28 poorest countries to reach this amount. The vast majority of this revenue comes from advertising, with only 3% coming from other products and services. An increasingly high number is expected to come from mobile advertisements.

Several factors make this high revenue possible. This popular search engine gathers one billion unique visitors each month. That is one in every seven people on the entire planet. These people spend 200 billion minutes each month on Google. That would mean that each visitor spends 200 minutes there each month, on average. Google’s expansion into email, social networking and other services has made the website even more popular.

From: Business MBA