Will Google’s dMarc Debacle Sour Future Deals?

Word came out last weekend that brothers Chad and Ryan Steelberg, who founded radio advertising company dMarc and then sold it to Google, have left Google just a year after the deal. Google bought dMarc for $102 million, with as much as $1.13 billion extra coming if certain revenue targets were met. Google’s Audio Ads program didn’t even come close to getting the brothers the big payout they’d expected, so they left extremely dissapointed, with about $200 million.
What went wrong? Obviously, people at both dMarc and Google felt dMarc’s technology was capable of reaching those revenue targets, and the fact that they didn’t was a failure on someone’s part. The fact that it took most of the last year to even launch a pilot program didn’t help, and dMarc’s founders blame Google’s single-minded focus on automating everything.
In the ad business, while automating has made Google […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg