At gamerDNA we were working with BlueLithium as one of our ad networks for our alliance network. BlueLithium was acquired by Yahoo! last September for $300M USD. They had only taken 11M in VC to start up, so it was a cash in for the major shareholders.
I noticed shortly after beginning to work with gamerDNA that something was a bit funny at BlueLithium. They were not excessively responsive and one day I had some problems with their phone systems, getting messages that the number was out of service. I wasn’t getting emails back from our account representative quickly, so I thought to simply try to call the numbers on their website.
Time after time the numbers listed on their contact page were all invalid. I called their PR line that was listed, which ended up being Blast! Public Relations in North Carolina. They informed me that they were no longer working with BlueLithium after the acquisition. I finally got in touch with someone at one of their “offices”, which is really just one guy working in NYC as their salesperson. He told me that he (and just about the entire sales team) had quit working with BlueLithium after the purchase. He was able to give me a contact at the company directly, so that I could find out why I couldn’t reach my account manager. Something smelled funny to me still. Somewhere in all of this I tried to call a Yahoo! business line for customer service (I think it was the phone root of my account manager’s line) but was politely told that they couldn’t help me reach anyone at BlueLithium and that there was no org chart at Yahoo! to be able to find who was the manager of my account manager.
Weird. I couldn’t figure out how they were running a company if neither publishers nor advertisers could reach them for new business. Couldn’t they have changed and updated the contact information on the website for the $300M investment at least? All they were able to put was “bought by Yahoo!” basically in a few places. In trying to Google for BlueLithium I was also shocked at the results. Almost every search result only came up with things about the Yahoo purchase. Nothing was from happy/upset customers. Nothing about about the quality of their service or their technology. I found a few things about their founder and his track record but unlike searching for something like Tribal Fusion or AdSense I got almost nothing except the very loud statement that Yahoo! had bought them and that all of Wall Street thought that it was a genius purchase.
I finally did get in touch with my account manager. She said that they had a temporary phone system problem and she was sorry to not have emailed to notify me. I was a bit uneasy and asked if everything was ok there. She said that things were fine.
Things still didn’t seem to line up. No one at BlueLithium seemed to give a rat’s ass about their jobs, what they were doing, performance, customer service, etc. There was another misunderstanding and I tried to get in touch with a manager there to mention a problem and I couldn’t reach anyone. None of them got back in touch with me. That’s odd when a concerned customer calls and tries to climb up the poll and no one bothers to call back at all, or even send an email. Something was up.
Then more recently I called my account manager to ask her about some demographic targeting features, which she oddly didn’t know much about (seeing that supposibly BlueLithium’s whole thing is data/analytics i was shocked), but she said that we’d actually need to switch to another network the RightMedia Exchange another Yahoo! property. I said that all things considered I was pretty happy with BlueLithium and that I’d like to stay with them. She said that they were migrating all customers to RightMedia or the Yahoo Publisher Network. I was told that it was 100% self service and that I’d have no direct account manager. Needless to say I wasn’t too happy.
Basically, Yahoo! bought Blue Lithium and then… well I don’t know what they’ve done. The customer base couldn’t have been worth that much and surely they lost many of them in dumping the customers over to another dissimilar and lower performing service. The technology couldn’t have been worth that much as I never saw anything too special in the ads served or in BlueLithium’s capability for targetting. I’m frankly confused as to what Yahoo! did asides from maybe take some competition out the of the market.
Pure speculation: Yahoo! made some business mistake. They had some plan to buy up a ton of ad networks to take on Google and others. They bought some companies for way too much, and realized that it wasn’t that easy. The employees at BlueLithium who were there in 2007 (and originally had options) took the money and ran (which is why every single one of the salespeople weren’t there) and what was left was a broken organization with little expertise, weak management, and massive gaps in it their internal knowledge. Yahoo! thought instead to then simply make the mistake go away and simply slide the customers (advertisers and publishers) over to other services and take what bits of the technology and management that were valuable and move on. This coupled with Yahoo!’s other business blunders over the past year and the mass exodus of anyone that knew what they were doing there makes me really wonder about the fate of the company. Microsoft made them a damn good offer a while ago, and I’m guessing whoever ends up getting them will have a bargan in comparison in the future.
