WebProNews

$8 million might buy thousands of newspaper ads, or perhaps three or so Super Bowl commercials.  But in this case, the $8 million will go towards funding Turn, the self-proclaimed “world’s first automatic targeting ad network.”

Turn was founded by Jim Barnett, the former CEO of AltaVista.  Depending on your point of view, that could be a good thing or a bad thing.  Still, in an “About Us” section, a promising corporate description states, “Turn eliminates the need for manual targeting and provides bidded CPA, CPC and CPM pricing for graphical and text ads.” 

Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, and Shasta Ventures were apparently happy with both pieces of information; according to VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, these three took part in the funding round.  All three were also present the last time Turn scooped up some money, and it’s usually a good sign when investors stick around.

Of course, Turn would also take it as a good sign if Google rolled over and played dead, but that’s not likely to happen.  Google, with its market cap of $177 billion (which is around 6,800 times the combined value of Turn’s two funding rounds), poses quite an obstacle.

Representatives from Turn were not available for comment, so, if you’ll excuse the pun, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see how this all turns out.