A  big day here at Zillow in terms of PR. First, I was  quoted in the New York Times:

Nonetheless, Zillow, which estimates home values, last month obtained $30 million in its latest round of financing, bringing the total to $87 million for the site, which was started less than two years ago. And its traffic in the third quarter was 20 percent higher than in the period a year earlier, according to Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s vice president for marketing and chief financial officer.

It has also begun posting home listings provided by brokerage firms. The first of these to participate is ERA.

“The housing slowdown has actually increased people’s appetite and interest,” Mr. Rascoff said. “In a crazy market like this, both buyers and sellers are trying to get an edge.”"

But more importantly, there was a great Wall Street Journal article today about Zillow Home Direct, our new suite of advertising products. ZHD plays off our greatest strength -- our ability to crunch data. It turns out that our data-crunching ability allows us to intuit a ton of information about our millions of visitors. And that in turn allows us to work with our advertising partners to target ads more effectively. Here's the Wall Street Journal article about the news. And for those who don't pay for the WSJ.com subscription, here's the text:

Zillow Taps Love of the Home

Zillow.com is tapping Americans' ongoing obsession with their home values to bring a new approach to online ad targeting.

The closely held Seattle company discovered that people looking up their own homes make up more than half of the searches for specific addresses on its site, which offers estimates of values and other information for the 70 million homes it tracks. Now Zillow is letting advertisers pay to have their ads displayed on its pages for specific homes as a way to reach the people who own or are in the market.

With its Home Direct Ads program, advertisers can target homeowners by address, estimated home value, demographic classifications and the likelihood that they are planning to move. Zillow says it can predict when someone is gearing up to move, based on site-visitation patterns for a specific home's page, such as a big increase in page views. It is betting that companies with products and services commonly used around the sale or purchase of a home -- such as mortgage brokers, moving services and furniture retailers -- will be attracted to the program.

Sony Corp.'s electronics division has purchased Zillow ads targeted at people who own homes or who are looking at homes valued over $1 million, says David Cohen, U.S. director of digital communications for Interpublic Group's Universal McCann.

The ads, which Sony started buying about two months ago, are aimed at marketing Vaio laptop computers to upscale consumers. "This is the next layer of targeting," says Mr. Cohen. "It's about actual data, and we think there's a lot of value there."

But by far my favorite analysis of this news comes from the media analyst Greg Sterling who writes: "Zillow has always seen itself as a media company. The real estate site, which launched in early 2006, has continued to add features and listings that are very real-estate centric. But with the introduction of its "DirectAds" program it has become something else -- a site that uses its considerable data and data-mining capabilities to allow for precision ad targeting based on location, income, and other variables. In fact, this is probably the most precise geotargeting ad capability online: down to the house."

Hopefully these announcements about our advertising focus will convince you once and for all that we really are a media company!