Adify Selected by Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive to Power WPNI Blogroll Advertising Initiative

WebKnowHow
Thursday, February 22, 2007; 06:35 AM

Adify Corporation announced today that Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) has selected Adify’s Build Your Own Network (BYON) platform to enable advertising across its newly launched Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) Blogroll program.

WPNI Blogroll program, launched today in a separate announcement, is a first-of-its-kind effort to create and sell new advertising packages that reach Washingtonpost.com’s national audience and highly targeted “long tail” readers of third-party blogs from across the web via a single ad buy.

While blogs and other long tail content attract highly targeted audiences and are of tremendous appeal to marketers seeking to reach elusive demographics, current advertising models are still not optimized to reach these fragmented audiences. By organizing blogs into easy-to-buy ad categories including travel, business, technology and environment, WPNI Blogroll program takes an important step towards overcoming this challenge.

WPNI chose Adify because of its turnkey and flexible Build Your Own Network platform, which minimized the complexity of creating a new, customized ad network from scratch. Adify’s system provides all of the infrastructure necessary to promote and sell text, image and rich media advertising inventory across a custom-built ad network. In addition to helping media companies create new advertising offerings, Adify also provides the key network management services required to execute advertising campaigns, including ad management, tracking, reporting, billing and payment.

“This type of endeavor – combining our ad space with that of third-party publishers into new ad units – is a media industry first and we sought a partner that could remove the complexity of quickly getting it off the ground,” said Jeff Burkett, director of business development for WPNI. “With Adify, we started with a solid foundation and needed only to focus on our core competencies of identifying the right content for our readership and attracting advertisers.”

“In a highly fragmented media environment, established media brands like Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive have a unique opportunity to help consumers discover new, high quality third-party content that builds on the value they already deliver,” said Larry Braitman, co-founder and CEO of Adify. “By leveraging Adify’s Build Your Own Network platform, these brands can extend this value and create exciting new advertising offerings, while enabling small publishers to reach new readers and advertisers.”

Since launching its technology at the Web 2.0 Conference in November 2006, nearly a dozen custom ad networks have launched using the Adify platform in areas ranging from extreme sports to tax season. For example, Sportsyndicator is a series of outdoor and extreme sports-oriented advertising networks encompassing Web sites – and serving advertisers – in this underserved niche, while the Policlicks network allows marketers to connect with nearly 4.4 million members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Advertisers or publishers interested in joining or building an Adify ad network can learn more at www.adify.com.

About Adify

Adify was founded in 2005 by online advertising pioneers from Flycast Communications, one of the original online ad networks. Adify’s mission is to empower online publishers to sell advertising through a variety of new channels, including self-service storefronts, vertical networks and open marketplaces. Adify is based in San Bruno, Calif. and is funded by Venrock Associates.