Webfusion

With the $1.4 million purchase of the domain name Ad.com by Directi at last week’s TRAFFIC Conference in Silicon Valley, two distinct sides of the online media landscape are emerging: as growing companies such as Directi move to expand their offerings, larger media companies are taking a long, hard look at their business models.

The India-based Directi purchased the domain through its Skenzo subsidiary, which provides optimization and advertising feeds to publishers. Interestingly, Time Warner is simultaneously preparing a spin-off of AOL, including its Advertising.com Platform-A division, which has been known as “Ad.com” by industry insiders for years. With online media at a crossroads, the auction highlights a larger shift in branding:

Big Media versus Emerging Media

In its recently released quarterly earnings statement, Time Warner reported that AOL revenues fell by 23%, including a 12% drop in its once-strong paid search syndication agreement with Google. As the company prepares to spin-off the subscription and advertising business, former Google vice President Tim Armstrong is actively working to rebuild the company in preparation for its independence. While AOL is taking a hit, so are the other major players in the space, including Google, which saw its first quarterly decline in search revenue since going public. Never one to stand still, Google is laser-focused on developing its Android mobile platform.

So how did Directi justify its million dollar purchase of a domain name? Just a recessions lower consumer demand and fragment markets, they also open opportunities for smaller companies to innovate while larger rivals work to lower their costs. ABC Search, a 2nd-tier search engine which relies upon syndication deals to generate queries, recently purchased the domain Advertise.com and re-named itself accordingly. As Advertise.com stated in a press release, “(We’re seeing) a sea-change in the way brands generate paid visibility on the web, and how ad publishers are compensated for their work in creating an audience.”