TechTarget Company Assessment: TechTarget's Market-Defying Act

TechTarget is a hot, Massachusetts-based publishing upstart that serves enterprise IT professionals responsible for platforms such as Linux, technologies including mobile computing, and applications such as CRM. This Briefing distills lessons from TechTarget's success and what this success signals: the payoffs for vendors from task-focused services; the irresistible appeal of delivering aggressive returns on investment (ROI); the power of blended business models; and the dividends from precise execution, even when the basic blueprint is a mature and 'old-fashioned' controlled-circulation/user-qualification core business structure. The Briefing provides a company profile and a review of key product lines. It highlights TechTarget's sharp focus on serving specific customer tasks with the right content, which permits advertisers with properly targeted messages to reach a very high percentage of users with a high need for evaluating their products. For commercial content vendors, the Briefing provides an outstanding example of how a traditional News & Trade information model has been updated for the Internet age. For content deployment professionals, it provides many good reasons to add TechTarget to their recommended sources of IT content.