Burst Media Archive

Boston-based Burst Media is announcing today the launch of a new vertical ad network for food-related sites. Anchored by CDKitchen.com, the network will start with approximately 30 Web sites.

Mediapost has additional details on the launch which include, "The CDKitchen Cooking Network is made up of 30 food-focused Web sites drawing more than 4.3 million visitors and delivering more than 23.5 million page impressions monthly. In addition to CDKitchen.com, sites in the network include DianasKitchen.com, ActiveDiner.com, VegSource.com, Massrecipes.com, and RecipeCircus.com."

The launch of this food-related ad network comes a month after the launch of Burst’s moms ad network. This shift to vertical ad networks within Burst makes sense if (and only if) they are able to sell ads. Their ad sales capability gets questioned regularly on the Burst publisher forum. I would suggest that they share their strategy with their publishers, something that they haven’t done as of yet.

Checking the CDKitchen site, the ads were all served by Tribal Fusion. Perhaps Burst should get them fixed up before pushing the press release to the wire.

(Editor’s note: Burst serves a tiny fraction of ads on CN, the percentage used to be much higher until the fill rate and pricing dropped)

Boston-based advertising network Burst Media has announced the lauch of a new "mom-centric" advertising network. The Burst Moms Network is comprised of 150 websites with "content targeted to this important demographic segment." Burst Media is one of the longest running online advertising networks.

In my research over the last 12+ years, moms click ads more than any other segment. So it makes sense that Burst target this demographic. Will Burst be successful with this moms network? Sure if they can sell ads into the network. I believe they are seriously struggling on selling ads into the technology channel.

From the note to Burst publishers, "Burst created the Moms Network to give advertisers a focused set of high quality websites – centered on the needs of young mothers – in a fully transparent environment." Double points for including "transparency" in the release – what does an ad network have to do with transparency?

Updated January 8 – I received an update from Chief Marketing Officer David Cooperstein, "As you will know from being a publisher on Burst Network, we offer publishers and advertisers full information about each other – reative, campaigns, and eCPMs for publishers, and site lists, performance, and publisher information on the advertiser front."

Unfortunately Burst along with many of the other ad networks are still stuck in 1996. I’ve been with Burst since they began and have seen no innovation whatsoever. I am working on a longer post about this topic in general but am continually disappointed by the lack of innovation. 

Editor’s note: Burst handles an ever-shrinking portion of ads on CenterNetworks.