Banker

I have it under good authority that the site that New Media loves to hate is going through a major change. PayPerPost, the marketplace that helps match advertisers with publishers willing to review their products (for a fee), is changing its corporate name to IZEA.

The short version is that PayPerPost has put together a huge stable of products over the course of its development cycle, among them — Zookoda, BloggersChoiceAwards, Rockstartups (their vlog), URLBrief and several others. They are using this name change to organize these products, putting them all under the umbrella of a social media marketing firm.

Obviously, PayPerPost will head up this portfolio as the firm’s flagship product and advertising arm.

Wild Speculation

Another interesting bit of news from the PayPerPost camp is a bit of additional news about their stealth product, Argus. Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA describes the product like this, “Argus is the kind of breakthrough marketers and bloggers have both been asking for. It will have broader appeal and set new standards for scalability in social media marketing … The combination of advanced reporting, open APIs, blog analytics, management tools and social networking features will be extremely attractive to marketers that want to actively engage in online conversations.”

As one of the few PayPerPost neutral bloggers out there (disclosure: I know one of the investors in the company and have spoken to several higher ups in the food chain) I will be interested in seeing where they are going with this idea. They seem to be expanding further out into the wilds of social media — which makes one wonder what the real goal is. The idea seems to be much more expansive than they have been letting on up to this point.

I think a lot of the mystery will be cleared up when we finally learn what Argus is all about, but my speculation is that it is some kind of promotional tool for their stable of bloggers. If you look at Zookoda and the BloggersChoiceAwards, you will see that a common thread is that they are generating features to connect and promote those publishers who are monetizing their blogs through PayPerPost. Maybe Argus is their vie to create the type of cross-promotional synergy that networks like Federated Media currently enjoy.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Whatever the case, it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the tech media reacts to the news. It seems almost a waste not to send out a release like this on Friday to get a piece of the Saturday Techmeme dust up.

[Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed before leaving]

  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • Fark
  • Mixx
  • Propeller
  • TwitThis