BannerPlay, an Israeli startup founded last summer, has caught the eye of some major investors.
Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters (News – Alert), gave the company between $100,000 and $150,000 recently. He told an Israeli business site that he expected BannerPlay to easily carry the traction that it has gained in Israel over to other markets in the U.S.
“I believe BannerPlay has a big opportunity to server the small and medium size business (SMB), which is currently not well addressed by existing solutions,” Glocer said.
According to founders Rafi Ton (News – Alert) and Yoad Gidron, BannerPlay seeks to give SMBs “a chance to stand out and shine in the crowded world of online advertising.”
BannerPlay Studio is a platform that harnesses HTML5 to allow clients to publish ads on the Web or on mobile regardless of the OS or platform. The company’s online Banner Studio lets SMBs create their own ads using a large selection of existing templates and graphics.
Ad creators can also include widgets such as forms, chat and even games in their banners.
The business works according to the pay-per-click (PPC) model. In addition to designing ads on Banner, the site offers SMBs analytics tools to tell them where their ads appear and how they perform. Additionally, SMBs can set up A/B testing to see which variations make some ads perform better than others.
BannerPlay offers a community for graphic designers and game developers to contribute their work for use in ads. Each time a designer’s work is used in an ad, the designer receives a percentage of the revenue.
In addition to offering BannerPlay Studio for SMBs that want to create ads, the company offers BannerPlay Direct for companies, bloggers and others that want to publish ads on their websites.
Using BannerPlay Direct, a website owner can sell advertising space to customers, who can then design their ads using BannerPlay Studio. The site owner can decide which ads to promote and which ads to nix.
If you create BannerPlay Studio ads, then you can sell your ad inventory to others through BannerDirect’s Zero Risk Publishing feature. If your ads don’t sell, then BannerPlay offers them to its premium advertisers. Any remaining inventory goes to Google (News
– Alert) AdSense.
BannerPlay currently has over 1,000 clients. Israeli journalist Viva Sarah Press calls them, “The Ikea of advertising.”
Edited by
Brooke Neuman