Rocketboom's New Sponsorships

A few months before Amanda Congdon left Rocketboom last year, the small show with a huge audience ran out of money. An eBay auction was their last hope. They sold off their ad space to the highest bidder–TRM, an ATM machine company, bought $40,000 in ad sales, saving the online video zeitgeist’s frontrunner from ruin.

Then Amanda left and some chaos occurred. Remaining Rocketboom partner Andrew Michael Baron devoted his focus to the show rather than to the making the sponsorship as interactive an advertising experience as it could have been. But TRM was simply happy to help the show they loved enough to bid good money for being seen advertised on.

So Baron took this philosophy and created a new kind of sponsorship deal, announced yesterday and beginning with YouTube. Each sponsorship gets a blog page with customized content, text impressions with link back to sponsor, advertising retained unchanged through archives, and “subtle sponsorship” in original Rocketboom content.

But the key element that Baron is offering potential sponsors is input into what kind of advertising support they would like Rocketboom to showcase. The show is willing to offer a certain amount of customization based on the sponsor’s needs, which is cool.

Each episode will cost $3,000 before Sept. 1. After Sept. 1, episodes will cost $5,000. Start-ups that seek to sponsor the show will receive a discount.

To see it in the works, check out today’s episode.