Fast Company magazine launches ad-supported mobile site
By Dan Butcher
March 30, 2009
Fast Company on the iPhone
Business media brand Fast Company launched an ad-supported mobile site at the recent South by Southwest Interactive Festival.
The magazine tapped Crisp Wireless, a provider of mobile advertising and mobile content services for media companies and brands, to power Fast Company Mobile. Crisp will sell and serve ads for the new mobile site.
"Fast Company writes news that mixes business and technology for people who are looking to get a deeper look at the trends and people that shape new business," said Tom Limongello, senior director of business development for Crisp Wireless, New York. "The strategy behind the partnership is to create an ad supported mobile service for Fast Company's readership.
"In the short term we will support their site monetization through sponsorships and, as traffic grows, we will help them sell CPM advertising, leveraging Crisp Wireless' suite of mobile ad units and modules for sponsored content," he said.
Fast Company charts the evolution of business through a focus on the most creative individuals sparking change in the marketplace to uncover the best and "next" practices.
Savvy marketers are using Twitter to spread the word
The Crisp Wireless Publisher Network has more than 200 mobile Web sites from more than 45 major media companies and their brands including Time Mobile, The Huffington Post, Perez Hilton, A&E Television Networks, USA Today and Discovery Communications.
The company also publishes the Crisp Wireless Index, providing quarterly data on mobile traffic and consumer behavior across its network.
Created and hosted by Crisp Wireless, Fast Company Mobile can be found by typing http://m.fastcompany.com into a mobile browser.
Fast Company Mobile will display feature articles, along with daily news and analysis about technology, design and ethonomics.
Just as with its online property, readers can share interesting articles with friends or post to social bookmarking or networking sites using Crisp's Save/Share feature.
Crisp Wireless will sell ads for the mobile site on behalf of Fast Company and will also be responsible for ad-serving integration in the form of banner ads, photo galleries and interstitial ads.
The news of the Fast Company mobile site launch was first tweeted by the company's @fastcompany account to the magazine's thousands of followers on Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service, and was quickly picked up by and re-tweeted across the network.
Throughout the event, Fast Company drove traffic to its new mobile site through links in its Twitter feed. In fact, traffic increased nearly 5,000 percent in the days following the Twitter announcement, according to Crisp.
"Twitter has become the news feed for many people, and tech publications were the first of many verticals to notice this, which made it important for us to create a mobile-aware link shortening service that we call shortn.me," Mr. Limongello said.
"So much of Twitter's traffic is mobile it would be a disservice to readers not to have an easy way to direct twitter traffic to an optimized mobile experience," he said.