Comcast Readies Portal-Ad Push
By Matt Stump -- Multichannel News, 11/4/2005 4:35:00 PM
Look out, Madison Avenue: Comcast Corp. has gotten Internet-portal-ad religion.
The nation’s top MSO with the largest broadband-subscriber count, at 8 million users, plans to start selling video ads that would appear before streaming clips on its Internet portal.
“We noticed that consumers are very tolerant of having ads at the head of the video stream,” Comcast Cable Communications Inc. president Steve Burke said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, citing the success of ESPN 360 and MTV Broadband.
Comcast streams more than 30 million clips from “The Fan” per month. “That’s a huge opportunity for us,” he said.
Burke added that Comcast plans to be more aggressive selling ads in front of video-on-demand streams, citing the 1 billion streams the MSO has already served up in 2005.
The advertising push will begin over the next six months, he said.
