Demand Media has acquired real-time event coverage provider CoverItLive, which is used by brands like Yahoo, ESPN, Ford, Time, News Corp, EA, FOX News, and BBC. Demand Media is positioning the acquisition as a way for the company to expand its social reach.
CoveritLive lets audiences of events engage in real-time, provides instant reader polling, and contains Q&A capabilities (which could be helpful in itself for Demand, considering the the company’s Q&A site AnswerBag was recently hit by Google’s algorithm update).
"CoveritLive really reflects our mission as a company – publishing what the world wants to know and share," says Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt. "Consumers around the world are tuning in by the millions to participate in live events powered by CoveritLive, collectively spending over a billion minutes on the platform each month. CoveritLive’s live event platform helps us continue to work towards that mission, building on both our social publishing model and our social media product offering with a platform that offers proven value to both brands and consumers."
Some noteworthy tweets from Rosenblatt about CoveritLive:
As an example, yesterday’s coverage of the Apple iPad 2 announcement drew 2.4MM readers in CoveritLive
Richard Rosenblatt
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Some of the current events on CoveritLive are at http://www.coveritlive.com/index.php?option=com_altcaster&task=listliveevents&Itemid=223Richard Rosenblatt
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Try it: Key customers include BBC, Ford, ESPN, CNET, EA. Case studies are here <http://bit.ly/eqXJcC>Richard Rosenblatt
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It looks like the CoveritLive team will be sticking around, and a big product upgrade is apparently on the way:
Answers to common q’s today: all very happy, team staying, more resources, biggest product upgrade in 2 years comes next Wednesday.
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Demand Media and CoveritLive were already strategic partners. The two companies have worked together since 2009, with Demand Media even having a minority stake in CoveritLive. The product will become part of Pluck, Demand Media’s social platform. Pluck itself is already used by a lot of major brands:
"Like Demand Media, we started CoveritLive to help fill the gaps in online content. We saw an opportunity to cover live events in a way that no one had before by combining talented writers, multimedia and two way engagement via comments and polls," said CoveritLive President and Founder Keith McSpurren. "As a Demand Media partner, our joint customers have seen the value of combining our service with Pluck’s integrated community platform. It’s a powerful combination that helps marketers engage consumers before, during and after an event."
According to Demand Media, events hosted on CoveritLive attract an audience of over 60 million people every month, 60% of which comes from outside the United States. The company has been talking about expanding more internationally, so this acquisition should help with that too.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not revealed.
Earlier this week, Demand Media announced a partnership with Rachael Ray on creating food content for eHow.
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