Kyle Johnson, one of Pipeline’s 10 entrepreneurs in 2011, receives the program’s Innovator of the Year award in January 2012.
One year after being named Pipeline‘s Innovator of the Year, Kyle Johnson has launched a product he thinks can not only save the online music industry, but other forms of online media, as well.
Since last January, Johnson’s startup has switched its focus from competing with the likes of Pandora and Spotify – it has its own music streaming service called AudioAnywhere – to wanting to boost their revenues.
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“We want to help these other guys become profitable,” Johnson said in a phone interview.
Johnson’s pursuit of this new mission led to the spinoff of AudioAnywhere’s ad platform, Bixy, and the launch of a parent company, 42 Labs, under which both products are now held.
“What we realized is that the whole problem with online advertising is that it doesn’t involve the consumer and as consumers we just don’t care,” Johnson said.
Bixy aims to solve this problem by bringing consumers into its ad platform. Consumers have the ability to create a profile on Bixy in order to discover ads and rewards geared specifically toward their interests. Businesses then can target those consumers either on Bixy’s own website (bixy.com), which is free to do, or across the web, such as a music streaming service or a TV station’s website.
The targeted advertising system generates revenue every time an ad is served or clicked on a partner site, or when an ad is clicked on bixy.com (below).
“We’ve talked to dozens and dozens of businesses and they’re not happy,” Johnson said of the current advertising platforms. “They don’t view online advertising as valuable because nothing works. We’re trying to make it very efficient and cost effective.”
Johnson said that he expects the ads on Bixy’s own site and its partner sites to yield more than 10 times the traffic of businesses’ previous advertising. Since its launch, Bixy has signed up about 30 businesses.
Though 42 Labs has shifted its immediate focus away from its own music streaming product, AudioAnywhere, it’s far for being forgotten by the team.
“There’s a lot of consumer love for streaming music,” Johnson said. “We want to keep funding this and doing this because consumers love it.”
Johnson said AudioAnywhere has been “put on ice” in order to focus on Bixy – 42 Labs now uses AudioAnywhere to test the ad platform.
“If AudioAnywhere never takes off, that’s OK, because Bixy is the real secret sauce,” Johnson said.
Since AudioAnywhere’s inception nearly three years ago, 42 Labs has raised close to $1 million.
In the coming year, Johnson hopes to expand Bixy to include impression-based and social media advertising. But more importantly, he said 2013 is all about proving the model and selling to advertisers. In a phone call today, Johnson said he was nearing a deal with a publisher, someone who could quickly ramp up the number of advertisers by acting as a re-seller.
Credits: Kyle Johnson photo courtesy of Pipeline.
