Archive for February 9, 2010
MySpace Music, Targetspot Selling Audio Ads
MySpace Music will run instream audio ads sold by national Internet radio sales company Targetspot. According to reports, the audio ads began running last week for advertisers like Turbo Tax and Office Depot. The ads are inserted after a listener hears one song, and can be followed by a complete album or up to 100 songs on a playlist without another interruption.
Targetspot has announced that this is an exclusive deal that adds MySpace Music’s audience to a network that includes AOL, CBS, Yahoo!, Slacker and Live 365.
Since MySpace Music’s launch in September 2008, unique visitors to the music.myspace.com subdomain have increased 190 percent — growing from 4.2 million unique visitors to 12.1 million in June 2009. Year-over-year traffic to the URL has increased 1,017 percent. Since June, MySpace acquired social music site iLike, and later added imeem to its platform as well. MySpace Music was an announced key partner in Google Music’s music discovery platform.
This is great news for CBS backed Targetspot, and for the Internet radio industry. Last fall Pandora announced that they were beginning to air instream audio ads. It’s important for the development of a successful business model for Internet radio that key platforms like Pandora and MySpace Music contribute to creating that business model by running audio ads and creating more and better opportunities for advertisers on their platforms.
