Online Media’s Second Heat Wave: Video and Radio Gain Momentum
Online video as well as radio are transforming into bigger and bigger, constantly-evolving industries, which accelerate along with the rest of the tech industry. Naturally, online video has attracted a great deal of marketers, and Adap.tv is one start-up making big gains by monetizing this area.
It does so by offering a platform where publishers can manage their online ad inventory, and a marketplace which allows marketers to buy inventory for lower prices and publishers to make use of their unsold inventory. This concept evidently works, considering the start-up just announced it has raised $20 million in a round of funding.
“The company’s new funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing backers Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures and Spark Capital also participated.”
The latest round raises the start-up’s total funding to an impressive $50 million, and the recently secured sum will be used to boost international growth and further develop its offerings. These need to remain relevant, and more importantly attractive as the online video advertising market evolves, but it’s the only media segment to do so.
Online radio follows on the international scene as well – UK’s entire radio industry including the BBC teamed up to create UK Radio Player, “the most important development in the 50-year history of UK radio”. The joint venture is still in beta, but it already plays 138 stations, and represents a huge leap in the transition of traditional media worldwide to the web – where the real audience is.
Going back to the online video front, music video content provider Vevo will hit Australia in the second half of this year. The company was first introduced to the U.S and Canadian markets 2 years ago, and is already offering 30,000 with 60 million views a month from North American.
Video, and particularly music streaming is an area which caught Amazon’s eye as well, who recently launched Cloud Player and Cloud Drive. Cloud Drive is a personal cloud storage service that puts a special emphasis on music storage, which means it not only competes with Box.net, Springpad who recently updated its Android app and others; but with iTunes too.
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