Yesterday was huge for us. We launched SocialSpark into public beta at Ad Tech San Francisco to rave reviews from advertisers and bloggers as well as investment bankers and VCs. There was a lot of buzz surrounding blogs at the show. Federated Media confirmed that they raised $50MM on a $200MM valuation and many financial types were in our booth presumably looking for the next big thing. Inevitably each conversation came down to one question “how big can this thing be?” to which I answered “how big is the longtail of social media?”.
I was then asked “How does your reach compare to FM? What are your
ComScore numbers?”. To be honest I had no idea. While we have been
adding sites to the SocialSpark ad network for sometime the site itself
has only been up for a little over a month. It hadn’t occurred to me to
look. I tucked that question away and decided to revisit it later in
the day.
When I finally gained access to view the data I was amazed. I knew we were expanding our reach very quickly, but I had no benchmark to compare it against. According to ComScore the reach of SocialSpark in Alpha was already more than twice that of Federated Media.
The fundamental difference between IZEA and FM is our approach to monetizing the blogsphere. FM represents a small amount of high traffic blogs like TechCrunch. They trade on the brands of well known blog properties and utilize a large sales force to pitch them to agencies and companies. Our approach is the exactly the opposite. We represent a large number of primarily undiscovered long and medium tail blogs and manage most of our advertisers through a self-service advertising platform. We provide the bloggers with a community, tools and information to help them expand their reach and earning potential over time.
We are able to achieve a larger reach and scale faster because our universe of bloggers is exponentially larger and our marketplace model is technology driven.
What does this mean to you as a blogger?
ComScore is the measurement tool of choice for many agencies and brands. They utilize this tool to identify and verify ad networks for their media buys. This report clearly makes IZEA and SocialSpark a major contender for media dollars in the blog advertising space.
What does this mean to you as an advertiser?
Reach, diversity and targeting. We can help you execute large scale campaigns to promote your product, service or website throughout the blogosphere. More importantly, we can match you with the niche bloggers that care about your industry…be it computers, automobiles or knitting. Go as big or as small as you want.
I am looking forward to another big day at AdTech. If you are at the show stop on by.
