• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, June 10, 2014

This week brought more consolidation in the digital radio arena. WideOrbit, which provides advertising management software for media companies, announced its acquisition of Abacast, a company that specializes in streaming, live and on-demand advertising insertion and other monetization techniques for digital radio.

The deal, which closed on June 6, will allow WideOrbit to offer a wider range of services to clients, covering both broadcast and digital ad platforms.

Abacast's main service, Clarity, is a cloud-based digital ad platform for online streaming radio by terrestrial broadcasters, pure-play digital radio companies and podcasts, used by around 1,500 online radio stations and hundreds of podcasts. For its part, WideOrbit's ad services are used by around 2,600 TV and radio stations and media networks around the world, while another 3,200 stations use its automation services.

WideOrbit will incorporate Clarity and Abacast's other services into its digital product line, which includes other recent acquisitions like Fivia AdFront, a service for managing digital ad sales, inventory, orders and billing, and WO Traffic - Internet Orders, which enables broadcasters to manage both spot and digital inventory from a single interface. Fivia AdFront and WO Traffic will add Abacast's digital monetization services to provide a single, integrated ad management system across multiple media platforms.

This is just the latest in a series of strategic moves in the digital radio space. Last year, Cumulus took a stake in Pulser Media, the parent company of Rdio, a digital radio platform, in exchange for exclusive content, media and on-air promotional commitments over a five-year period. Under the terms of the deal, Rdio also gets access to Cumulus' ad sales personnel to monetize ad-supported free products.

In March, the Media Rating Council granted Triton Digital accreditation for Webcast Metrics Local, a service within Webcast Metrics that measures local streaming audio listening, the company announced Tuesday.

According to figures from Triton and Edison Research, currently, 47% of all Americans ages 12 and older -- an estimated 124 million people -- have listened to online radio in the last month, while 36% (94 million people) have listened in the last week.