Last year the ad-funded streaming model was hailed as the saviour of the music industry. Now things aren’t looking as peachy. Spotify is struggling to break into the American market and competitors are scrabbling to come up with alternative ways of funding free music online. Were we all a bit too quick to embrace ad funding? Phil Nott, the UK manager of Adswizz, doesn’t think so. According to him the ad based model will work if the messaging is relevant to the individual user.
What is Adswizz?
Adswizz is an adserver that is used by publishers and media owners when they need to monetize inventory. We serve ads into audio (web radio and music sites ), video and iPhone applications and compete with Google’s Doubleclick and Microsoft’s Atlas products.
One of our main focuses is online audio i.e. FM Radio, who are also streaming their content online. Adswizz cuts the stream and inserts web only ads that are IP targeted during their allotted ad breaks. We also serve a companion video ad so online users listening to a web radio station can hear and see messaging for the same brand at the same time.
How does the business model work?
Publishers buy a cost per 1000 CPM rate to use the system, based on the number of ‘ Ad Impressions ‘ served in any given month.
What are your plans for the future?
We want to provide an integrated offering to publishers to serve ads across all different platforms (an audio ad for web radio, a video ad on the web site and a video banner ad to an iPhone, for the same brand).
How will artists make money in the future?
Users prefer free sites that are ad funded, but the ad delivery needs to be sophisticated and more targeted to charge higher CPM’s and to make the ad messaging amongst the music more relevant.
What is the future of radio?
The future for radio is the web – not DAB (eventually we feel that Internet Radio will the
dominate medium over DAB for Audio listening). Listening to radio online will increase substantially in the next few years via many devices, but basically its all going to be streamed. And that’s where we come in.
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