Ad network Pulse 360, a subsidiary of Seevast, is on the brink of shutting down and may have closed its doors already, AdExchanger has learned. Pulse 360 issued a company-wide layoff in April and began looking for a buyer or new investor, according to a former employee who asked to remain anonymous. Pulse 360 founder and CEO Kent Keating has not responded to requests for comment.
Prior to the latest round of layoffs, the company had approximately 75 employees and 100 to 200 publisher partners, including MSNBC.com, CNN.com, ABCNews.com, Cox Media and USAToday. The company has an estimated 300 to 500 customers.
Traffic to Pulse360.com’s network has dropped precipitously from 124.7 million views in January of this year to 19.2 million in March, according to Quantcast. Calls to the company’s main line are directed to voicemail, and the site’s “client services” and “inquiries” pages have been deactivated.
According to another source, Pulse 360 may have been “delinquent” in paying publishers, and its creditor M&T Bank has “terminated the company’s line of credit and seized the bank accounts needed to operate the company.” M&T declined to comment, citing its privacy policy.
Buffalo Business First reported that Pulse 360 had closed its New York City office more than a year ago and laid off employees as part of a restructuring. Former CEO Jaan Janes also left the company for first-party data analytics provider Yieldbot.
Keating told Buffalo Business First’s David Bertola that the restructuring was due to changes in Federal Trade Commission regulations making it easier for publishers to sell their ad inventory themselves, bypassing third parties like Pulse 360. “It [2011] was a flat year for us. We made some product changes, we had a restructuring and some jobs were eliminated,” Keating told the publication.
Based in Getzville, New York, Pulse 360 is a subsidiary of the marketing firm Seevast Corp., which was founded by Keating and includes search engine marketing company Kanoodle and ad network-building company Syndigo. Calls to Kanoodle’s office were not returned and the Syndigo website appears to be down. Of what led to Pulse 360’s decline, the aforementioned former employee speculated that the company “got away from its core business.”
If Pulse 360 does close, it would be the latest in a string of advertising companies running out of steam this year, following former ad exchange AdBrite, news publisher ad network quadrantOne, and ad network Adify.
Zach Rodgers contributed.
