Mpire has almost had more lives than a cat at this point. When I first wrote about the company back in 2006, it had just rolled out an online comparison shopping service for used products. By 2008, it had changed focus to WidgetBucks, an online ad network that allowed small Web publishers to tout products on their sites.

Now, the 18-person company -- backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Ignition Partners -- is altering its course yet again. It is shutting down the WidgetBucks service, a fast-growing ad network albeit one that was hard to monetize. In its place is a relatively new product dubbed AdXpose. The technology -- in development for the past year and an outgrowth of the WidgetBucks ad network -- is designed to help advertisers identify whether their online ads are showing up in the proper places.

"It is one thing to tell people: 'hey you showed up on porn. It is another thing to say: 'hey, we guarantee you that you won't since we proactively stop that from occurring,'" explains Kirby Winfield, chief revenue officer at the company.

Today, the company is talking more about the transition and rolling out new features of the product which allows advertisers to receive alerts when online advertising campaigns run into issues. Those can include problems such as the online ads not hitting the correct demographic groups or geographic areas or the wrong types of site. As part of the alerting feature, the company is rolling out an ad blocking technology to help advertisers stop ad campaigns that violate pre-set terms.

Winfield, a former executive at Marchex, said that advertisers like the concept of ad blocking because it helps them protect their brand online in what is an increasingly complex online advertising ecosystem. To do that, Mpire essentially creates a rating system -- kind of like the motion picture rating system of G, PG, R and X -- that it applies to all Web pages.

Winfield notes that companies can choose different thresholds, since advertisers like Budweiser and Disney may have different standards as to what is acceptable online. The tool also allows advertisers to provide a Web site to provide a "blacklist" of sites that they don't want to appear on, and inversely a "whitelist" of sites that are appropriate.

Mpire is currently selling direct to advertisers, but it is also making inroads by offering the service to the ad networks. That part of the business is gaining momentum, with Winfield noting that the ad networks don't really know where the ads they serve appear. "They don't know this stuff, and that's why having an independent third-party analytics company like us provide the service is important," he said.

Winfield

AdXpose is charging 20 cent CPMs on the high end for the service, with higher volume clients getting a discount. Winfield declined to say how many customers are using the service, but he said that 20 percent of the comScore top 50 advertising properties are using AdXpose.

There's certainly plenty of competition in the advertising analytics space, with Winfield saying that AdSafe and DoubleVerify are the two biggest competitors. But others are eyeing the market, including Kirkland-based Adometry and Aggregate Knowledge which just raised cash from OVP.

Winfield said that advertising analytics is "$100 million plus opportunity" for Mpire.

There was also a lot of promise and hope for WidgetBucks after it raised $10 million in venture financing in the summer of 2008. But things change, and Winfield said they are now "sunsetting" that business in order to attack an opportunity that arose from troubles that arose in the WidgetBucks' pay-per-click ad network.

"The reason it didn't work is the reason we are focused on AdXpose analytics," explains Winfield. "Once you look under the hood, what you find in the ad network business -- and particularly on the long tail -- is that content qaulity is low, user quality is questionable and the point at which the user is sitting in the sales funnel is often really pretty far away from where we wanted to be."

Winfield said it wasn't so much that WidgetBucks was a bad business, but he noted that it just "isn't an attractive model" given that ad networks have become a commodity and therefore are now selling at severe discounts from where they were a few years ago.

"We see technology and analytics garnering a lot more recognition of value," he said.

Asked about the company's many incarnations, co-founder and CTO Greg Harrison said he believes Mpire is now on the right path. "If there is a migration or a key switch that's kind of transporting the company in this direction, this is more of an enterprise direction," he said. "It is definitely a different direction ... and the key difference here is a movement away from the (long tail of the Internet) and more toward enterprise."

For all of the talk about the power of the long tail of the Internet, Harrison said it was simply hard to monetize because so much of it was user generated. Because of that, advertisers just weren't sure what they'd get on a day-to-day basis.

And that's the problem that AdXpose is trying to solve, with Harrison saying they want to provide advertisers with "brand safety" across the Internet.

John Cook is co-founder of TechFlash. Follow on Twitter @johnhcook.