Start-up to help profile Web surfers

Dave Morgan, the founder and one-time chief executive of Real Media, on Friday launched True Audience, a software company intended to help Web publishers boost advertising income by providing software that interprets audience traffic, the company said in a statement. Online ad revenue has plummeted across a host of Internet-based media companies, which have been scrambling to find ways to measure their audiences and to track the effectiveness of ads.

The New York-based start-up builds technology that retrieves and aggregates audience data such as age, gender and ZIP code from various publishing applications that offer content, ads, e-mail, site registration and subscriptions. Web publishers can use that information to construct individual profiles of site visitors and thus identify specific segments of their audience for prospective advertisers.

"True Audience will provide the tools that enable Web publishers to qualify, quantify and package their audiences in ways traditional advertisers know how to buy," Morgan said in a statement.

The Weather Channel's Weather.com site is among the companies evaluating the software.

True Audience will be licensed to customers for approximately $100,000 a year, with consulting and support services priced at about $50,000 a year. Upgrades and additional modules will be sold separately.