Online radio ad network shows promise

  • Friday, December 12, 2008 8:43pm
  • Business

The advertising market is gloomy, and radio is in a particular funk. But Doug Perlson still feels pretty good.

Perlson heads TargetSpot Inc., which acquired a rival in October to create the largest seller of Internet radio ads. New York-based TargetSpot will handle online ads for more than 1,000 stations, including those owned by terrestrial broadcasters such as CBS Radio, which is an investor in TargetSpot, and Internet-only radio sites such as those on AOL and Live 365.

Partly because this market is nascent, “our business has a good shot at more than doubling in 2009,” Perlson said. His company does not disclose sales figures.

TargetSpot sells 15-, 30- and 60-second audio ads for online radio stations, with companion visual ads, that can be targeted to people in specific geographic areas, based on the Internet address of a listener’s computer, among other factors.

Advertisers can also track whether an ad is effective, because listeners can, for instance, click on a link to be routed to a certain Web site.

TargetSpot began two years ago with ads from local businesses. But Perlson said major advertisers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., J.C. Penney Co. and Macy’s Inc. have signed up.

If TargetSpot can help Internet radio stations make more money, the timing couldn’t be better. Radio stations are under the gun to raise online ad revenue because of the higher royalties they could have to pay to stream music over the Internet.

Google ads magazine content: Google has added a magazine rack to its Internet search engine.

As part of its quest to corral more content published on paper, Google Inc. has made digital copies of more than 1 million articles from magazines that hit the newsstands decades ago.

For now, the old magazine articles can be found only through Google’s search service for finding digital copies of books. But the Mountain View, Calif.-based company plans to eventually include magazine articles in its general search results.

Users who want to restrict the scope of their inquiries to magazines can choose that option through the book search’s “advanced” function.

Dozens of magazine publishers have agreed to let Google index their archives. The incentive: Google will link to the Web site of a participating magazine publisher and share some of the revenue that is expected to be generated from ads shown alongside the old articles.

The list of old magazines already available through Google include past issues of New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and Ebony.

WWII archive available online: An online collection of World War II documents, billed as the world’s largest, debuted last week. Footnote.com, which archives historical documents on the Web, developed the collection with the National Archives and Records Administration.

The collection starts with 9 million “hero pages” profiling individual U.S. veterans of World War II with data taken from Army enlistment records. Veterans and their families and friends can add further information and photos.

The project also includes an online reproduction of the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, which is inscribed with the names of more than 1,100 crewmen who died when the battleship was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941. Visitors to the Web site can search for the names of the victims.

From Associated Press

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