• by July 18, 2007

Regardless of the outcome of the current online radio royalty negotiations, webcasters will continue to need incoming ad revenue to foot the bills. Hoping to increase those dollars by making Web radio more accessible to advertisers, leading online radio rep firm Ronning Lipset Radio on Tuesday partnered with upstart technology company Corstarr to offer a new ad server platform to its RL Select network of independent Internet stations.

Just six months ago, the founders of Sacramento-based Corstarr were themselves just small independent webcasters, running RL client GotRadio.com. When RL told them they needed to adopt ad-serving technology in order to run 30 and 60-second spots, they developed their own system, now dubbed Adcor.

According to RL Radio founders and co-managing partners Andy Lipset and Eric Ronning, the new platform surpassed what was otherwise available for their RL Select stations. While the rep firms's larger clients--Yahoo Music and AOL Radio, as well as Live 365--had their own ad serving systems, Adcor specifically and successfully addressed the scheduling, customer service and reporting needs of smaller and mid-sized stations, said Lipset, and also possessed scalability and the ability to expand into online video, mobile and social networking.

For advertisers, RL said that Adcor provides third-party validation and tabulation of impressions; real time reporting on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis; viewing and monitoring of specific channel performance in online networks with multiple channels; and viewing of click-through rates with synced banner ads--what users see on the Internet screen as the audio spot plays.

RL Select affiliates already using Adcor as their trafficking system for audio and visual ads include Dot1Media and Beatles-A-Rama.

The RL Radio/Corstarr agreement came a day after the release of comScore's June rankings showing online radio as the fastest-growing Web category--led by RL clients Yahoo and AOL--and just two days after the original deadline for Internet radio's greatly increased royalty payments.

Ronning said the timing of the announcement was coincidental, since "the wheels were in motion a number of months ago," but that the news was "more relevant" due to the increased "emphasis on the fact that online radio is a business--and a real business."

JP Morgan has estimated the audio ad portion of that business at $100-150 million annually, with other elements like banner ads and shared terrestrial radio ads bringing it up to $500 million. Still, neither the Interactive Ad Bureau or the Radio Advertising Bureau are exactly pushing online radio as an ad medium, and Ronning hinted that something similar to podcasters' recent launch of the Association for Downloadable Media may be in the hopper.

Lipset noted that RL Radio has been functioning as a "de facto OARB (Online Audio Radio Bureau)" for years now, "demonstrating for brand-driven advertisers that the medium works."

Just a week ago, leading ad rep firm Katz Media Sales helped validate the space by acquiring Net Radio Sales, which it said reaches 5 million listeners a month.

RL Radio, using terminology common to the radio industry, said it now has an average weekly cume of 5 million--about ¾ of a million through RL Select. Since its founding four years ago, the firm said it has sold more than 6 billion ad impressions, placing more than 60% of all audio ads sold.