Podbridge Turns Up the Volume with $8.5m Funding

Podcast audience and ad measurement firm Podbridge has raised $8.5m in a second venture capital deal, which will provide cash to strengthen both its technology and business.

Podbridge, which raised $6m in its first round of funding, develops technology to measure the amount of times an ad reaches a person consuming video or audio from a media player. When consumers visit a Podbridge-enabled site to download a file for the first time, they also download an iTunes plug-in that remains on their PC and communicates with their mobile playback device. This technology makes it possible to gather stats on audience profiles, listening habits, frequency and location, as well as a download count known by the firm as the Podscore™.

Podbridge's Founder and CEO, Murgesh Navar, commented: 'This new funding further validates our business strategy and growing leadership as a provider of audience measurement and ad insertion services for downloadable video and audio content. We envision providing analytics and ad services for downloaded content across a wide range of media players and devices.'

New investor Sutter Hill Ventures led this second series of funding, with initial investors Mayfield Fund and Worldview Technology Partners also participating. Sutter Hill's MD Greg Sands has joined initial investors Yogen Dalal and Irwin Gross on the Podbridge board.

The medium may take time to grow from an advertising perspective. Analyst eMarketer is predicting that the podcast advertising market will grow to just $400m in 2011, a little over 1% of total ad spend which is expected to hit $36.5b in the same year. eMarketer describes podcasts as a niche market, saying that even the most widely consumed podcasts typically have fewer than 50,000 downloaders.

However, Californian-based Podbridge says it sees the potential in helping traditional media companies push their content online and is predicting that the two-year old firm will become profitable by 2008. The company is online at www.podbridge.com while eMarketer is on the web at www.emarketer.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

• EMarketer
• All news