Q Interactive Acquires Postmaster Direct

Pay-for-performance ad network Q Interactive announced earlier today it has acquired e-mail list concern Postmaster Direct for an undisclosed sum from market research firm Authentic Response.

Authentic Response was a unit of Return Path until 2008 when the e-mail deliverability firm spun Authentic Response—which included Postmaster Direct—into its own company.

According to Matt Wise, president of Q Interactive, the acquisition of Postmaster Direct adds 11 million permission-based e-mail addresses to his company’s 40 million, growing its permission-based e-mail database by a fifth.

“We want to be the leader of branded opt-in advertising by creating the largest, safest opt-in based e-mail advertising network out there,” said Wise.

Also according to Wise, the Postmaster Direct file is skewed more toward business-to-business marketing than Q Interactive’s file, giving the firm a lift in its b2b offerings.

Founded in 1995, Postmaster Direct was launched as part of a firm called NetCreations by entrepreneur Rosalind Resnick.

Resnick was one of the first proponents of fully confirmed opt in marketing where a new e-mail subscriber must respond to a confirmation e-mail in order to be added to a marketer’s file. To differentiate her offering, Resnick coined the term “double opt in,” a term that is commonly used and abused by marketers today.

At one point, Resnick reportedly had grown the Postmaster Direct file to 40 million names.

“It’s smaller now than it was historically,” said Wise. “We have great hopes to scale it back up.”

For one thing, he said, Q Interactive has a slew of advertising relationships it can leverage. Also, he said, Q Interactive’s targeting technology, or its TrueConversion Engine as the company calls it, will subject the file to targeting and segmentation the likes of which it hasn’t been subjected to previously.

Postmaster Direct has changed hands three times since its parent, NetCreations’, founding.

NetCreations was acquired by Italian yellow pages and trade directory firm Seat Pagine Gialle in February 2001 for $111 million in cash shortly after the dot-com bubble burst.

Return Path acquired NetCreations for an undisclosed sum in 2004.