A few months ago, we wrote about Meebo’s attempts at monetizing its service through advertising. At that time, Meebo was looking into interactive ads like quizzes and polls, as well as long-form video. Today, Meebo’s CEO and co-founder Seth Sternberg wrote a bit more about the company’s experience in bringing advertising to Meebo and its efforts to implement interesting ads without alienating its users.
VideoEgg
It does look like Meebo is indeed trying to implement some of its earlier ideas about what advertising on the site would look like. Meebo already features a number of ads on its site and has estblished partnerships with various large content producers, but starting today, Meebo will also feature ads from the San Francisco-based advertising network VideoEgg. These new ads will range from “sponsored games to video trailers to product configurators.” Some of the ads will be sharable, while others will come with associated wallpapers and buddy icons. Some ads will also automatically expand if a user hovers over them for more than 3 seconds.
Transparency in Advertising
When we first wrote about advertising on Meebo, we asked if ad agencies could make ads that don’t suck. It does indeed look like Meebo has been putting a lot of thought into this process (the original partnership between Meebo and VideoEgg was announced almost a year ago) and is devoting quite a few resources to getting its advertising model right. It will be interesting to see how Meebo’s user will react to these expanded monetization efforts.
