Mercora Inc. today launched the beta version of its new Mercora MadWords, the first targeted self-service advertising framework for music.

Mercora MadWords is aimed at anyone interested in advertising to a primarily young, broadband-connected audience (more than 65% of Mercora users are between the ages of 18 and 35). It should instantly appeal to a broad range of advertisers, including Promoters of music, retailers, concert and event promoters, consumer electronics equipment manufacturers, manufacturers of musical instruments and audio equipment and more.

“Mercora has created a fast growing network for people to search, listen and discover music for free,” said Srivats Sampath, president and CEO, Mercora. “Mercora MadWords now gives advertisers a chance to serve focused and targeted advertising that is both relevant and in context with the music discovery experience.”

Mercora MadWords provides advertisers with a simple and flexible self-serve mechanism. Specifically, the system enables advertisers to do the following:
• Create, target, deploy, and measure their music keyword-based advertisements;
• Target advertisements based on keywords such as music genres and artist names;
• Deploy Google-style text ads, in-line ads or graphical ads that are presented to the user in the context of a music search or when they are listening to the music; and
• Measure results on a Targeted CPM basis (TCPM), which delivers highly contextual search placement without the risk of click fraud.

Mercora’s music search and user-contributed music discovery network has grown into the largest catalog of music on the Internet, with over 3 million unique tracks and over 50,000 channels of music available at any time. Mercora’s user base exceeds two million downloaded clients, 85% of whom are broadband users, over 90% have made a product purchase online in the last six months, and more than 65% are between the age of eighteen and thirty five. These users like to consume music in both a lean back and lean forward manner where they can apply the familiar “search and find” metaphor of the Internet to music discovery and enjoyment. By providing a highly immersive experience, Mercora has the average user logged in daily for more than three hours and twenty minutes, and spending approximately 43 minutes listening to music every day.

Advertisers are given an automatic price quote online immediately when they choose the type of ad they wish to run, the number of impressions they want to obtain, and the degree of targeting they wish to engage. Introductory pricing starts at $2/TCPM.

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