PaperG’s Flyerboard Generated Nearly Six Figures in New Ad Revenue in First Month’s Use at Chron.com
NEW YORK – Ad tech start-up PaperG Inc. announced that it has signed an agreement with Hearst Newspapers to deploy PaperG’s dynamic new ad unit Flyerboard across Hearst Newspapers’ network of 15 web properties, including SFGate.com, the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle, and TimesUnion.com, the Albany Times Union’s website. The agreement comes after Hearst piloted Flyerboard at Chron.com, the website of the Houston Chronicle.
Flyerboard takes offline behavior online by adapting the concept of the cork bulletin board for use with a market’s local or hyperlocal websites. It gives local businesses an intuitive, inexpensive and shareable vehicle to attract customers, and provides for many their first foray into online advertising.
“Just as today anyone can be a publisher, with Flyerboard we’re enabling anyone to be an advertiser,” noted Victor Wong, CEO of PaperG. More than 50 websites now offer Flyerboard as a low-cost way for local businesses to advertise effectively. At Chron.com (ex: http://www.chron.com/sports), the Flyerboard has attracted advertisers online in ways that traditional banner ads hadn’t.
“We were pleased by the ease of Flyerboard’s deployment at Chron.com and the amount of new ad sales revenue we generated in only its first month,” noted Stephen Weis, VP Digital Sales of Hearst Newspapers.
In the ten months since Flyerboard’s debut, prominent local and hyperlocal websites across the country have successfully deployed Flyerboard to attract more local advertisers. These include mtvU’s College Media Network, Boston.com, Parenthood.com and others.
PaperG’s Flyerboard arrives at a time when the media industry is undergoing a seismic shift in its business. The economics of the current advertising model make it difficult to cover the significant overhead costs required to produce a quality editorial product. PaperG set out to address the challenge by creating greater efficiencies on the ad sales side, while at the same time lowering the barrier for many local and smaller businesses to advertise online.
PaperG Inc. (http://www.paperg.com) was founded in April 2007 when Yale University students teamed with Harvard University students to reinvent the relationship between local online publishers and local businesses. CEO Victor Wong, a former economics major from Yale, was joined by Chief Operating Officer Roger Lee, an applied mathematics major from Harvard and former publisher of the Harvard Crimson, Chief Technology Officer Victor Cheng, a computer science major from Yale, Chief Financial Officer Ka Mo Lau, a former economics major from Yale, and VP Business Development Tyler Bosmeny, an applied mathematics major from Harvard.
PaperG has attracted to its board of advisors a range of esteemed publishing, technology and advertising industry veterans. Among them: Stephen Taylor, publisher of the Boston Globe’s Boston.com during its first five years of existence, Mark Potts, co-founder of WashingtonPost.com, Liddy Manson, former COO of Freewebs and VP of Washington Post Interactive, Scott Symonds, executive media director of AKQA, a leading interactive marketing company, and Peter Himler, public relations executive and founding principal of Flatiron Communications.
PaperG Inc. operates from the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute in New Haven, CT.
