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DirectTrack to Be Sold, What Does this Mean?

Performance Markting Insider has learned that a deal to sell one-time leading affiliate marketing company Direct Response Technologies, the company that runs DirectTrack, has been inked and is almost closed. The deal that is supposedly considerably less than it was bought for, only in the several of millions, will be announced next week. According to insiders, the company has secretly been on the block for a while as Digital River has not been happy with the company nor it’s ability to grow in a crowded marketplace.

This seems to be perhaps the nail in the coffin for DirectTrack, as it has faced significant issues in the last few years that brought to light its technology and service problems. In 2010 it suffered a significant and public security breach when all of the data of it’s clients were stolen and put on the black market but a Russian hacker. (As a note, I caught the hacker) Last year the company faced even more problems and a public relations nightmare when it was down for days, leaving most of its clients with no tracking or data reporting.

This perceived failure of the company caused many clients to jump ship to other platforms that took advantage of these problems. Companies started mailing last year all the clients of DirectTrack explaining how their system was “better” and even some companies did public press releases and blog posts bringing up the issues of DirectTrack.

If the sale goes through, what does this mean to DirectTrack? While the buyer has not been announced, and we have a query into their PR department, this could either mean the closing of the company – with the technology being brought under another company’s roof, or that the company could be used for a significantly different purpose than running CPA networks and affiliate programs. The company could also, perhaps to it’s advantage, be relaunched under its own brand and roof, with the new management having more insight than the current.

However, let’s be completely honest here: Cake, LinkTrust, HasOffers and other tracking platforms took advantage of their downtime and other issues to gain significant market-share. Cake Marketing in particular took many of the clients, and others found other systems.  Even if it could rebrand itself, is DirectTrack’s technology even on par with the current generation of tracking systems?

Is this the end of the platform, and the mark of a new era in our industry?

Pesach Lattin
Pesach Lattinhttp://www.adotat.com
Pesach "Pace" Lattin is one of the top experts in interactive advertising, affiliate marketing. Pesach Lattin is known for his dedication to ethics in marketing, and focus on compliance and fraud in the industry, and has written numerous articles for publications from MediaPost, ClickZ, ADOTAS and his own blogs.

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