Clickable simplifies search ad campaigns for the masses
New York City's Clickable is a new company that fancies itself as the small company's answer for managing online search advertising campaigns. It has raised $3 million from Union Square Ventures and Pequot Ventures.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2007 the economics of search advertising are set by the big self-serve platforms, and the open question is who serves advertisers too small to buy help. The last data point in this corpus was LookSmart's 2005 bid to carve out a vertical niche around the giants; Clickable's answer is different — stay platform-agnostic and sell simplicity itself, backed by a $3 million round from Union Square Ventures and Pequot Ventures.
First-order effects
- Small businesses get a third-party layer that abstracts away per-engine campaign mechanics, lowering the expertise barrier to bidding on commercial search queries.
- The boutique search-marketing shops whose fees depend on that expertise now compete with software priced for the do-it-yourself advertiser.
Second-order effects
- The search engines' own SMB-facing tools face pressure to simplify or cede the relationship to whoever owns the advertiser dashboard.
- Venture capital validates an ad-management middleware category, inviting copycat funding rounds aimed at the same underserved tail of advertisers.
Third-order effects
- If tools like Clickable become the default interface for small advertisers, power in search advertising shifts partly toward whoever aggregates advertiser demand — the platforms still set the auction rules, but the middleware layer captures the customer relationship.
The trend: As paid search auctions grow more complex, a tooling layer is emerging between small advertisers and the major ad platforms.