There’s music in the air with the Thursday announcement of HuffPost Canada Music, the latest addition to the AOL Canada and Huffington Post Canada’s growing roster of multi-channel offerings.
Paul Cramp, general manager of male audiences, AOL Canada, described the launch as a “big, groundbreaking event,” particularly in light of the fact that there is no similar music channel counterpart in the U.S.
AOL already offers Spinner.ca, Boombox, Noisecreep and other online channels, each offering themed content for its specific demographic, featuring music, videos, radio, news, interviews and more.
“This rounds out our audience. HuffPost Music is more of a general industry news, celebrity gossip, and entertainment content type of site,” added Cramp.
Cramp pointed out that the AOL music offerings combined have roughly 950,000 unique visitors monthly across the Canadian editions of their various music brands, including Boombox, AOL Music and AOL Radio.
“But what we found is that on the AOL platform, we’re not offering the same kind of viral capabilities that we can in the U.S. and we don’t have the same kind of sharing and commenting capability on that platform as we do on The Huffington Post,” said Cramp. “So that was what prompted the idea. And then we looked at the crossover in audience between the HuffPost audience and the AOL music audience, and there was little crossover, so we thought that maybe we could expose that great content to a whole new group of people.”
HuffPost Canada Music launched with the support of Hewlett-Packard as an advertiser, with its media agency PHD. Hewlett-Packard has a large buy across all the media sites for the next three weeks, promoting its back-to-school products.
The new venture is being monetized through the availability of custom integration, custom sponsorship and standard display media ads that are available across all HuffPost channels.
