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New Media News Every Morning

Podango’s P2 Platform now on beta

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podango.jpgPodango, a new media hosting, publishing and advertising platform, announced that a beta version of its P2 Platform is now available. The P2 Platform is designed to enable audio, video and blog publishers to deliver a fully integrated experience to their audience, in addition it makes it easy to embed media across sites, seamlessly add advertising and measure performance metrics. Publishers can start using the beta platform by creating their site at www.podango.com/p2.

Podango is providing podcasters (audio and video) with the most flexible and rich publishing platform. The platform’s rich feature set includes a complete set of tools for content creators including publishing tools for audio, video, and blogging, metric monitoring tools, search engine optimization (SEO), integrated advertising and the ability to embed the player in other sites. The streamlined end-user experience includes easy subscription, elegant presentation, and rich feedback mechanisms.

“With the launch of P2 beta, Podango is providing a single, complete, integrated platform for new media publishers,” said Lee Gibbons, CEO, Podango. “From hosting to monetizing to finding premiere content, the new media tools that are now available through Podango streamline the entire audio, video, and blog audience experience and publishing process.”

Originally posted on June 22, 2007 @ 4:50 am

Balihoo, advertising industry’s vertical search engine, launches beta

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balihoo1.jpgBalihoo, developer of the advertising industry’s first and only vertical search engine for advertising media, announced that it has launched a broad Beta Program involving a group of companies representing more than $25 billion in U.S. media spending annually. Participants in the program include media buying firms, advertising agencies and major national advertisers.

The Balihoo search engine enables advertisers and agencies to search for media properties that are most relevant to their advertising campaigns, gather and analyze information about those properties, and interact with media owners to build and execute media plans. Balihoo works across geographies and on any media type including TV, radio, print, interactive and out-of-home.

Additional participants will be invited into the beta program as they sign-up on the Balihoo website. “Input from participants in our recently concluded demo trial stage indicates that Balihoo will provide significant time and cost savings to the media buying and planning community,” said Pete Gombert, Balihoo’s chief executive officer.

Originally posted on June 19, 2007 @ 4:47 pm

MTV Networks, Visible World partner to offer targeted dynamic advertising solutions

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mtv.jpgMTV Networks and Visible World, a video advertising technology and services company, are partnering to give advertisers the ability to dynamically customize and target video ads in real-time across MTVN’s premier U.S.-based TV channels and websites, including the MTV, MTV2, VH1, CMT, Spike TV, Comedy Central, TV Land, Nickelodeon and Nick At Nite brands. The partnership marks the most extensive national deployment of dynamic video message customization across channels, programs and audience demographics.

“Our goal is to fundamentally change the way our viewers experience advertising by giving them an innovative experience, and our partnership with Visible World gives us the leading edge,” said Judy McGrath, Chairman and CEO, MTV Networks. “Our consumers can access relevant information from our marketing partners across every screen.”

“We are excited to partner with MTV Networks to offer advertisers new strategic capabilities that optimize the effectiveness of their messaging across many platforms in this rapidly evolving media landscape,” said Tara Walpert, President of Visible World.

Visible World’s technology and services enable advertisers to target, tailor, monitor, and actively change video ads within seconds. Now, MTV
Networks’ marketing partners can pre-program and proactively edit across all channels and websites their ad content on-the-fly.

Originally posted on June 18, 2007 @ 2:09 pm

Openads secures $5 million financing

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openads.jpgOpenads, developer of a free, open source adserver designed for and used by publishers worldwide, announced that it has secured $5 million Series A financing led by Index Ventures. The London-based company plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its team.

Openads allows publishers to have complete control of their advertising campaigns, offering sophisticated targeting, inventory optimization, rich media and inventory forecasting from a simple yet powerful interface. Openads also allows for integration with more than 30 leading ad networks worldwide. Embraced by more than 20,000 publishers across 140 countries in 20 languages, Openads powers more publishers than all competing solutions combined.

Popular Web sites such as Federated Media and Stardoll are among those relying on Openads’ servers. “Open source has made an impact in market after market. How could we expect advertising to be otherwise,” adds Tim O’Reilly, publisher and Openads user. “Openads has quietly become a major player in the web 2.0 ad scene via its open source adserver.”

Originally posted on June 13, 2007 @ 2:09 pm

Internet rivals TV for media time but lags in ad spending

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Jupiter Research, an authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, has found that the Internet continues to rival TV for consumers’ time while print media suffers the effects of online media usage. According to a new report, “Media Consumption Patters: Online Vies with TV As Primary Medium,” online users spend as much time online as they spend watching TV, while users under the age of 35 spend more time online than on TV.

Both TV viewing and online use have increased during the past five years, although usage appears stabilized. Consumers say they spend over ten times as much time with TV and the Internet as they do with print media like magazines and newspapers. Despite this trend, however, advertisers continue to spend disproportionately on print, with newspapers garnering nearly three times the expenditure of online. Money spent on television advertising remains the clear leader among the marketing mix with advertisers spending four times as much on TV advertising as all online advertising.

“Neither relatively better targeting nor the increasing availability of branding-friendly rich media and video inventory have led to any demonstrable online cannibalization of TV spending, ” said David Card, Vice President and Senior Analyst at JupiterResearch. “But that’s partly because over half of users’ time online is spent in communications, like e-mail and instant messaging.” The complete findings of this report are immediately available to Jupiter Research clients.

Originally posted on June 13, 2007 @ 11:21 am