Phorm down on funding delays

Shares in Phorm, a targeted Internet advertising technology company, has told investors that there has been a delay to its subscription agreement which was made to raise 20m pounds in funding. The delay is due to problems with one of the parties involved in the deal.More positively, the company said its development in Turkey currently has 3.9m monthly unique users, compared to 3.3m at the end of August. The firm also boasted "excellent" publisher traction with greater than 70% monthly reach already achieved. It also said initial advertising campaigns showing a significant improvement in performance compared to current advertising. Its initial advertisers are now rebooking and providing budgets for next year. Looking forward the company said: "In order to be able to show advertising and generate revenue for both ourselves and our partners, we need to be able to access ad slots owned by websites in Turkey through a personalised content and advertising partnership."Campaign performance has been very good with targeted campaigns delivering on average more than 3 times the click through rates of current advertising performance. We expect that uplift in performance to grow substantially as our user base, website partnership, number and granularity of campaigns combine over the coming months to generate sufficient revenue to make our Turkish operation profitable. "We are very pleased to be able to report that we are now working with websites and publisher networks representing 4.7bn monthly ad impressions. Advertising requests from publishers for our opted in users are now being received at a rate of more than 130m per month and we expect this number to rise substantially over the next few months." The share price fell 13.99% to 83p.NR