Tinypass and Piano Media merge to form Piano
The new firm will be led by Chief Executive Trevor Kaufman, previously CEO of Tinypass. The deal reflects a global move by the media industry to paid models for digital content and the need for comprehensive monetisation, intelligence and analytics tools to support these efforts.
“Digital media businesses are increasingly focused on monetising their loyal users,” said Kaufman, “joining Tinypass with Piano Media to form Piano and globally standardising on our new VX platform will provide publishers and media companies with the most effective and usable monetisation and analytics tools available.”
Piano’s industry-leading VX software is based on a value exchange model that uses big data to segment audience and present user’s different monetisation options based on their individual profiles. “It’s obvious to everyone in our industry that the display-advertising-only model for content is broken,” Kaufman said. “Combining Piano Media and Tinypass puts us in an incredible position, not only to continue to address the fundamental software challenges faced by the media business – like managing users, getting good data, and tracking entitlements across the web, apps, and traditional media – but to help them innovate entirely new models as well.”
In addition to providing media companies with the capacity to seamlessly implement a virtually limitless array of pay and subscription models, Piano offers advanced data and CRM capabilities to help content companies identify and segment their audience, enabling business models targeted to the individual user. Piano’s platform integrates easily alongside existing advertising solutions, allowing clients to optimise their mix of paid and ad-supported media.
Piano clients include NBC Universal, Time Inc., The McClatchy Company, The EW Scripps Company, The Postmedia Network Inc., News Corp. and IBT Media. Recent launches have included CNBC’s Pro, the premium OTT streams of the Tour de France, and Real Simple magazine. Additionally, more than 1,200 other news and media providers around the world, both Omni-channel and digital only, depend on Piano’s SaaS platform to manage their paid content and subscription offerings across the web, apps, and physical media.
