NY-TINYPASS/PIANO-MEDIA

Tinypass and Piano Media, two pioneers in content monetization and paywall software, announced a merger today to create Piano, a SaaS company specializing in advanced media business processes and online commerce optimization software. The new firm will be led by Chief Executive Trevor Kaufman, previously CEO of Tinypass. The deal reflects a global move by media businesses to paid models for digital content and the need for comprehensive monetization, intelligence and analytics tools to support these efforts.

“Digital media businesses are increasingly focused on monetizing their loyal users,” said Kaufman. “Joining Tinypass with Piano Media to form Piano and globally standardizing on our new VX platform will provide publishers and media companies with the most effective and usable monetization 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 monetization 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 optimize their mix of paid and ad-supported media.

Piano clients include NBC Universal, Time Inc., The McClatchy Company, The EW Scripps Company, The Post Media Company, 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.

Kelly Leach, Piano Media’s former CEO, who will be serving as a senior adviser to the company and joining Piano’s board added, “Audience intelligence and optimization are critical elements of content monetization. By joining forces, the combined company is able to offer media companies the most comprehensive, effective and user-friendly platform in the industry. We look to forward this next chapter in our development.”

The deal follows several months of discussions between Tinypass and Piano Media and is effective immediately.

Piano is headquartered at One World Trade Center in New York, with European offices in Slovakia, Austria and Poland and a development office in Russia.

About Piano

Piano, headquartered in New York City, is a leading provider of metering and paywall solutions for digital content monetization and media user data analysis. Newspaper publishers using Piano SaaS software include: News Corp., The McClatchy Company, M. DuMont Schauberg, Postmedia Network Inc., Verlagsgruppe Passau, Digital First Media, DC Thomson, Agora S.A. and Romanes Media Group. Magazine publishers using Piano SaaS software include: Time Inc., Slate, Newsweek and Science Magazine. Broadcasters include: CNBC, NBC Sports and Cox. B2B publishers include: Greentech Media, Intellinews and Business New Europe. For more details see piano.io .

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150811005722/en/

Contact:

Harmonica / Conversion Logic
Katy Saeger, +1 310-597-2337
katy@harmonica.co
or
Peter Epstein, +1 323-251-3567
peter@harmonica.co