Yext helps local businesses manage directory listings, reviews, and other parts of their online presence. It’s a specialized but large corner of the marketing technology industry. They just completed their Initial Public Offering, a rare achievement these days. The IPO raised $133 million and yielded a $1.2 billion market capitalization. That’s ten times revenue if you track such things.
Marketo used to be a marketing automation system but it now calls itself an “engagement platform”. Whatever that is, it just got still broader with the company’s purchase of ToutApp, which helps salespeople send multi-step email campaigns. The extension from marketing to sales supports Marketo’s position in Account Based Marketing, which straddles both worlds.
More on ad measurement: comScore has expanded its “validated Campaign Essentials” to measure audience demographics, reach, frequency, and GRPs as well as viewability for Facebook display ads. The product already provided similar metrics for Facebook Audiences, Twitter, and Instagram. This is part of advertisers’ increasing resistance to unverified audience claims by the big social networks and to the networks’ power in general.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.