Ebuzzing, the European “video and sponsored content ad platform”, officially launches in the UK today.
The service, which has a slightly checkered history based on its original pay per-post model, offers an ad channel for viral videos: Bloggers sign up and blog about the video campaigns that interest them and get paid in the process. It’s part of the Wikio Group and has been operating in France and Italy since 2006.
In order to help match appropriate advertisers and set the price, Ebuzzing works with sister company Wikio, a sort of Digg/Technorati, which indexes and ranks over one million blogs and websites daily according to “social influence” and claims to be “Europe’s largest pool of influential blogs.”
Along with its video-based campaigns, Ebuzzing also offers “ethical and disclosed sponsored conversation, widget seeding and forum conversation” as another way for advertisers to reach audiences within the blogosphere and other online communities.
Ebuzzing has already trialed campaigns in Britain for brands such as Wrangler and Peugeot, while today’s official push sees the company open a UK office. In Europe as a whole, Ebuzzing says it has had over 1,000 brands use its service, including Ebay, Diesel, Mastercard, Microsoft and Toyota.
The Wikio group is led by Kelkoo founder, Pierre Chappaz. Kelkoo was sold to Yahoo! in 2004 for €475 million.
