Meebo launches toolbar ads today, ramping up revenue

Meebo is taking another big step towards making its instant messaging service profitable. It’s officially launching a new product that runs interactive pop-out ads within its IM toolbar available on partner sites. You might be on a racing site, for example, chatting with friends about car models, and you’ll see an ad for Toyota’s Prius — with AT&T, it’s one of the two marquee advertisers now using the service.
The toolbar ads were first announced in March, and intend to build off of Meebo’s recent successes with getting other sites to use the toolbar as well as selling similar advertising on its own site .
In case you’re not familiar, Meebo’s home site lets you log in and chat across multiple IM networks, including AOL’s AIM, Google’s Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook, MySpace, and more. The toolbar lets other web sites add a small pane at the bottom of their web pages; people on those sites, including social networks like MyYearbook, can either chat with friends on those sites or with their friends on the other IM services they’ve tied in with Meebo. So far, 85 partner sites have signed up, with the toolbar being deployed on around 40. Around 15 million people are exposed to the bar through these sites every month, with about 20 percent of them actively using it. Including the 15 million exposed to the toolbar, as well as its home site and other widgets, Meebo claims to reach more than 50 million.
Meanwhile, Meebo has been running similar ads on its home site. They appear on the home site’s toolbar — and now on partner site’s toolbar, and when you mouse over them a 900 by 400 pixel screen opens that displays a video or other interactive advertising. The ads can be targeted to users based on age, gender and relevant interests. Meebo says these ads see an average of one minute of time get a 10 times higher click-through rate than traditional online banner sites on social media sites.