Travora Media sells remaining assets: Ad network to live, content biz to close

Skift Take

Travora management ran the company into the ground, and its consumer sites languished and will die.

-Dennis Schaal

Travora Media’s anticlimactic next chapter begins as its assets have been sold to a company that hopes to build an advertising network for hotels, airports and Internet service providers.

AdVantage Neworks, which is in the process of a reverse merger with shell company JMG Exploration – which recently sold off its oil and gas interests to focus on digital advertising — acquired Travora on February 6 for an undisclosed sum.

Brendon Kensel, president of JMG Exploration, says the company will pair the advertising network with AdVantage Neworks to upgrade Travora’s targeting capabilities to build a large advertising platform for ISPs, and private networks at airports and hotels. The parent company, JMG Exploration, will soon change its name to MediaShift, he says.

Kensel claims the company will be “aggressively” rolling out its advertising platform to hotel, airport and ISP clients in 2013, and that the company has signed contracts, but he declined to identify any of those clients, citing confidentiality concerns.

The acquisition punctuates the collapse of Travora’s content strategy in which it acquired sites such as NileGuide and TravelMuse, and launched its own ill-fated travel-content site, Travora.com.

Kensel says MediaShift will have no interest in pursuing a content strategy and thus TravelMuse, Travora.com, and its mobile app will be shut.

“That is not part of our strategy,” Kensel says.

NileGuide and its Localyte brand will die a slower death, and NileGuide’s 10Best site was recently acquired by USA Today for an undisclosed amount.

Kensel says updating NileGuide and Localyte content will not be a focus, and they will be used as the basis for hotel and airport landing pages.

After Skift reported on Travora’s mounting challenges last month, the company’s leaders disputed the story, calling it “incorrect, misleading, incomplete or flat out wrong.”

Travora Media CEO Kirsten Forte and chief revenue officer Josh Steinitz, who founded NileGuide, are no longer with the company. Steinitz’s LinkedIn profile says he’s now vice president of global business development at Revinate, which specializes in social media for hotels.

Investors Rho Capital Ventures, Village Ventures, StarVest Partners, Austin Ventures, and Tenaya Capital no longer have any stake in Travora Media, which will continue to operate under its own brand, and they undoubtedly piled up huge losses, and left without much. Travora was founded in 2004 and raised some $33 million in funding.

Kensel says the advertising network, which was the only part of the business with any value, did $13 million in 2011 revenue — and that was mostly before Kirsten Forte was brought in as CEO in the fall of that year.

Kensel declined to say what revenue the ad network did in 2012, but two sources says it wasn’t too far off the 2011 number.

Kirsten Forte’s strategy to pair Travora’s advertising network with its own content sites and apps turned into a disaster.

Kensel says JMG bought Travora for its advertiser base and its 20-member sales team, which remains with the company.

Travora, formerly called Travel Ad Network, is the subject of a trademark lawsuit brought by Travel Spike, which alleges it was first to use the name Travel Ad Network.

Kensel says the JMG Exploration acquisition of Travora was an “asset purchase,” and he claims Travora under JMG Exploration ownership has no liability in the suit.


Follow @denschaal

  • http://twitter.com/eurocheapo Tom and Pete Meyers

    Sorry to hear this was how it played out. On paper, a large consumer site supplemented with an ad network isn’t necessarily a bad idea. This is more so a reflection of the futility of banking on SEO to drive large-scale audience growth.

    For what it’s worth: acquiring $11 million in revenue (or so) and 20 sales people seems more than an asset purchase, doesn’t it?

  • DennisSchaal

    The new president of Travora described it as an asset purchase in the context of the trademark lawsuit brought by Travel Spike over the Travel Ad Network name. Perhaps it has something to do with an attempt to avoid any liability from the suit. Is there a lawyer in the house?:)

  • http://buhlerworks.com/wordpress JEBworks

    And so they come and go!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=707976432 Dennis Schaal

    All the more credit to startups that actually survive and thrive, and create a business. RIP Travelmuse, NileGuide, Localyte etc.

  • http://buhlerworks.com/wordpress JEBworks

    It seems in the trip planning space there are few left and none of them seem to get the traction they need to succeed on their own or if acquired suffer the same fate as these three. It’s probably just much more complicated than the entrepreneurs think.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jondoliver Jon Oliver

    So this is shutting down – we as a publisher down here in Africa have been trying to contact them to get payment – no response whatsoever? Anybody have more timely information?

  • Durant Imboden

    As a publisher who’s been with TAN/Travora since the Cree Lawson days, I’m curious to see what the new owners intend to do with the existing ad network. Our average CPM has been up quite a bit since March 1, so maybe that’s a positive sign.

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