Buddy Media Delivers Advertising on Engaging Social Media Applications
A friend of mine recently introduced me to Buddy Media, creator of several popular social networking applications and games including AceBucks, Mental Blocks, Sudoku, Pirates vs. Ninjas, Vampires vs. Werewolves, Cops vs. Robbers, Air Hockey and Pub Darts.
Launched in 2007 by Michael Lazerow, Kass Lazerow and Aryeh Goldsmith, Buddy Media also offers application development services for social networking websites. At the time of writing this post, Buddy Media claims that they reach more than 8 million Internet users every month.
Buddy Media also claims to "build an application and drive 1 million users in just a few months" for its clients.
That's a very ambitious claim to offer publicly.
“Buddy Media approves each developer to certify that only developers working on engaging applications can leverage Buddy Media’s sales engine. Our main focus at Buddy Media is not to aggregate the most amount of inventory in the social media space. Frankly, there’s already too much social media inventory. Add together the traffic from MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and the other social networks, social applications, blogs and more, and you get to trillions of impressions a month! We’re only focused on helping developers of quality applications make more money from their apps with access to higher-paying advertisers who value targeted, premium reach.” - Source: Buddy Media Blog
However, the applications created by Buddy Media was not the reason my friend introduced it to me. Instead the reason was Buddy Media's new social media ad network called Buddy Media Advertising Network.
Targeting: Buddy Media allows advertisers to target their ads by age, sex and location. In future more targeting options are expected to be available according to BM website.
Pricing: Buddy Media offers several pricing models including CPC (clicks), CPI (installs) and CPM (impressions). Performance based pricing model is available to a select few marketers.
Creative: Advertisers can either use their existing creative or create new ones using Buddy Media's provided system.
Where ads are shown?: Advertising campaigns delivered through Buddy Media's advertising network reach applications created by an "invitation only" developer network and deployed on various social networking sites including Facebook. Advertisers are offered "visibility into the apps" on which their ads are displayed.
Clients: Buddy Media's clients include Microsoft, FedEx, Anheuser-Busch, Priceline, Readers Digest, Time Inc. and Huffington Post.
Funding: Buddy Media recently raised $6.5 million in series B financing round led by Softbank Capital, European Founders Fund and GreyCroft Partners. Earlier Buddy Media had raised $1.5 million.
Overall Buddy Media seems to promise high ROI and quality exposure for campaigns by carefully choosing developers that create engaging social media applications.
While Buddy Media may be able to create great exposure for brand advertising, I remain skeptical on the short-term immediate conversion part. After a while it is very easy for users to become immune to ads that are embedded in widget or applications.
How many times have you clicked on an ad within your favorite Instant Messenger or similar application that shows ads while you chat?
Userplane, the company that offers free chat solutions based on an advertising-revenue sharing model, embeds ads in their chat client. Yet I can bet that users who use Userplane's application remain involved in their conversation and end up becoming immune to advertising that is present.
The world of widget-embedded advertising is about to get very crowded with Slide and Rock You, among others, working on similar advertising networks.
From a user point of view there is one interesting thing going on here. Widget companies are getting access to the user's data based on the application they developed and then creating new business models and applications based on the information that's passed back from social networking websites.
Only time will tell where Buddy Media can take their current targeting offerings.
Launched in 2007 by Michael Lazerow, Kass Lazerow and Aryeh Goldsmith, Buddy Media also offers application development services for social networking websites. At the time of writing this post, Buddy Media claims that they reach more than 8 million Internet users every month.
Buddy Media also claims to "build an application and drive 1 million users in just a few months" for its clients.
That's a very ambitious claim to offer publicly.
“Buddy Media approves each developer to certify that only developers working on engaging applications can leverage Buddy Media’s sales engine. Our main focus at Buddy Media is not to aggregate the most amount of inventory in the social media space. Frankly, there’s already too much social media inventory. Add together the traffic from MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and the other social networks, social applications, blogs and more, and you get to trillions of impressions a month! We’re only focused on helping developers of quality applications make more money from their apps with access to higher-paying advertisers who value targeted, premium reach.” - Source: Buddy Media Blog
However, the applications created by Buddy Media was not the reason my friend introduced it to me. Instead the reason was Buddy Media's new social media ad network called Buddy Media Advertising Network.
Targeting: Buddy Media allows advertisers to target their ads by age, sex and location. In future more targeting options are expected to be available according to BM website.
Pricing: Buddy Media offers several pricing models including CPC (clicks), CPI (installs) and CPM (impressions). Performance based pricing model is available to a select few marketers.
Creative: Advertisers can either use their existing creative or create new ones using Buddy Media's provided system.
Where ads are shown?: Advertising campaigns delivered through Buddy Media's advertising network reach applications created by an "invitation only" developer network and deployed on various social networking sites including Facebook. Advertisers are offered "visibility into the apps" on which their ads are displayed.
Clients: Buddy Media's clients include Microsoft, FedEx, Anheuser-Busch, Priceline, Readers Digest, Time Inc. and Huffington Post.
Funding: Buddy Media recently raised $6.5 million in series B financing round led by Softbank Capital, European Founders Fund and GreyCroft Partners. Earlier Buddy Media had raised $1.5 million.
Overall Buddy Media seems to promise high ROI and quality exposure for campaigns by carefully choosing developers that create engaging social media applications.
While Buddy Media may be able to create great exposure for brand advertising, I remain skeptical on the short-term immediate conversion part. After a while it is very easy for users to become immune to ads that are embedded in widget or applications.
How many times have you clicked on an ad within your favorite Instant Messenger or similar application that shows ads while you chat?
Userplane, the company that offers free chat solutions based on an advertising-revenue sharing model, embeds ads in their chat client. Yet I can bet that users who use Userplane's application remain involved in their conversation and end up becoming immune to advertising that is present.
The world of widget-embedded advertising is about to get very crowded with Slide and Rock You, among others, working on similar advertising networks.
From a user point of view there is one interesting thing going on here. Widget companies are getting access to the user's data based on the application they developed and then creating new business models and applications based on the information that's passed back from social networking websites.
Only time will tell where Buddy Media can take their current targeting offerings.
Labels: advertising, buddy media, social media, social network
posted by Frank at 9:26 PM
0 comments
