Olive Media has added the Canadian inventory of Burlington, MA.-based Burst Media to its portfolio of online brands.
Burst sells what it calls “targeted long tail audiences,” which tend to be highly specialized, smaller scale vertical audiences. Its publisher site include MomsWhoThink.com and SpursReport.com, among others.
The Burst network boasts 10.2 million unique visitors and total page views of 382 million per month across Canada according to October 2010 data from comScore. The partnership boosts Olive’s monthly reach to 17.4 unique visitors.
Theresa Smith, vice-president of product for Olive Media in Toronto, said the company has been pursuing a long-tail strategy over the past 12 months or so, and has “big plans” for continued investment in the area over the next 12-18 months.
Smith said the new partnership is the formalization of an “ad-hoc” relationship the two companies had previously enjoyed.
“We started to understand a little bit more of their business and saw that their strategy and approach was essentially our strategy and approach when it came to the long tail side of the business,” she said.
Burst was similarly keen to explore a partnership, she said, since it had no Canadian representation. Canadian advertisers seeking access to Burst properties previously had to work with a U.S. based sales company.
Smith said that the Burst partnership also dovetails with Olive’s plans for a search re-targeting product it is working on, in which keyword search data is collected and used to serve relevant display ads across the Olive network to people who have made specific searches–for used cars or mortgages, for example.
“It’s about bringing on quality content and publishers that we can then run that ad across,” she said.
Olive’s network already includes TheStar.com, ReadersDigest.ca, Cyberpresse.ca, NYTimes.com and CNET.com
