Renowned Rock/Heavy Metal Radio and TV Personality Eddie Trunk Engages Paid, Inc. for Promotions and Web Site Management

BOSTON & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Popular national syndicated FM and satellite radio personality EDDIE TRUNK has contracted Paid, Inc. (OTCBB:PAYD) to design, build and manage a new web site, as well as to develop and handle merchandising, mobile promotions and fan community relations.

This partnership will allow fans to purchase merchandise related to Eddie himself or to the rock and heavy metal music he plays on his weekly radio shows, “EDDIE TRUNK LIVE” on XM satellite radio and “EDDIE TRUNK ROCKS,” which airs live on Q104.3 in his local listening area (New York City, New Jersey, Long Island and Connecticut), via the internet on various outlets, and in syndication through New York-based Radio KG Broadcasting in markets as far reaching as Texas, North Dakota and Washington state. A 25-year radio veteran with a vast weekly radio audience, EDDIE TRUNK also appears frequently on television on VH1, VH1 Classic (where he served as a host and interviewer for five years), and in New York City for MSG Network where he currently serves as host and interviewer for music artists of all genres. Simply put, Eddie is THE respected voice in rock and heavy metal in radio and television. Trunk and his radio network continually sponsor and host local concert events, and he is now enlisting Paid celebrity services to add mobile promotions, merchandise sales and other V.I.P. related offerings for the events.

Trunk has a phenomenal reputation as a lifelong expert on all forms of rock -- its music, history and the larger than life personalities involved. He also has an extensive history in the music business working in artist management and as VP of Megaforce Records in the late ‘80s. He is a crusader for keeping radio fresh, unique and exciting while playing the music he loves, which includes doing all of his own programming and producing in addition to hosting his shows, which dominate ratings and draws raves from his numerous celebrity guests and fans in the nation’s number one radio market and beyond. Trunk has a tremendous impact on his audience that stretches far across and outside the United States, to an international fan base who listen to his local show’s rebroadcast at www.knac.com. Trunk connects to his audience with a knowledge and passion for what he does. His shows are appointment listening and mix music, talk, interview, calls and opinion.

Eddie Trunk is very well known as a national figure, and there is significant potential for promotions, activities and events both on and offline nationwide as he broadens his audience.

Trunk stated, “My fans are accustomed to accessing my show on the Web, and I’m excited to leverage an incredible opportunity with Paid to offer them a richer fan experience right then and there, by linking in exclusive member-only merchandise, V.I.P. ticketing, online and mobile content and other fresh approaches that mix very well with my passion for metal and my loyal listeners who share that passion.”

“To fans, EDDIE TRUNK is as legendary as the music and musicians themselves. And to the celebrities, he is not just an expert, but someone they want to hang out with, hence the constant stream of big names that appear on his shows for hours at a time,” said Keith Garde, Paid celebrity services president. “Eddie accomplishes things that become a part of heavy metal history, like getting the first real interview with Axl Rose in 15 years and talking Twisted Sister into a reunion performance after a 14-year split. The list goes on and on. We are thrilled that by bringing in Paid’s web site management and other promotional services, we can really leverage and build on Eddie’s fan base and his exceptional body of work.”

Paid’s management of the web site www.eddietrunk.com will create a registered fan base to which it will deliver members-only access to special communications and events, exclusive archived materials and an array of merchandise for heavy metal lovers and fans of Eddie’s radio broadcasts. Especially in the Northeastern U.S., mobile promotions are expected to add to this fan base and further build Eddie’s following as an already super-popular connection to not only the music, but to a long line of rock celebrities such as Guns N Roses, Ace Frehley, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Aerosmith and Kiss to name just a few.

About Paid, Inc.:

Paid, Inc. operates a diversified set of businesses, including its celebrity services and AuctionInc ecommerce technology businesses. Paid, Inc.’s celebrity services provides celebrities and organizations with official Web sites and fan club services that include e-commerce storefronts, ticketing and fan experience packages and web site content to attract tens of thousands of visitors daily. Using proprietary patented technology, Paid's innovative AuctionInc brand shipping calculation and auction management software and services are utilized to streamline online auctions, ecommerce and web site development and hosting. The Company also sponsors autograph signing events and other sports marketing services for sports clientele. The Company's common stock is traded on the OTC Bulletin Board under the symbol PAYD. For further information, visit http://www.paid.com.

Forward Looking Statements:

This Press Release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that are based upon current expectations or beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions about future events, including matters related to the Company's operations, profitability, business development efforts, and expectations about celebrity programs and fan club activities, technologies, and services. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements and the assumptions upon which they are based are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations and assumptions will prove to have been correct. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties. In addition, other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are discussed in the Company's most recent filings, including Form 10-QSB with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Star Tribune takes personalized approach to Web

The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune is the very model of a modern major metro.

It’s already the city’s dominant mass medium through its printed product. But now it’s exploiting its online presence to give its readers and advertisers a more personal experience, said Jason Erdahl, the Star Tribune’s executive director of interactive media operations.

Case in point: The Home Page Experience ad program, launched in 2006. The program gives marketers an opportunity to reach Web visitors through a variety of ad formats based on the number of times a visitor accesses the paper’s home page.



“What’s worked for us is that the user sees the message in different ways as they come back to the front page,” Erdahl said. This minimizes the chance a consumer might ignore the ad because of repeated viewings of the same message, he said.

The paper (Monday-Friday, 335,443; Saturday, 372,657; Sunday, 570,443) listed the ad packages at $19,000 each and booked 50 last year.

Home Page Experience reflects the paper’s embrace of the Web, a commitment that netted the daily three NAA Digital Edge awards this year for most innovative storytelling, best local guide/entertainment site (see box, below) and best digital ad program.

That’s on top of the four regional Emmys the paper garnered from the local chapter of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, citing the Star Tribune’s animation, still photography and videography efforts.

Yet even as the paper built its award-winning programs, its staff had to contend with rebuilding its Web infrastructure from scratch following the 2006 sale of the Star Tribune from McClatchy Co. to private venture firm Avista Capital Partners.

“McClatchy had the Web operations set up so that everything was centralized through the parent company,” Erdahl said. “McClatchy did a fine job, but this gave us an opportunity to look at things again and we decided to go with the best-of-breed option.”

The answer was a mixture of shrink-wrapped and custom apps, Erdahl said.

To that end, the Star Tribune tapped Clickability Inc. for its content management software and Silverpop Systems Inc. for its e-mail and newsletter alert functionality. The newspaper also maintained and expanded relationships with vendors such as Planet Discover, which was selected to provide search engine and shopping portal support.

Finally, the paper renewed its contract with Omniture Inc. for Web analytics and installed an ad management app from Google Inc. unit DoubleClick.

“The site may not look entirely different but nearly everything has been dramatically changed,” Erdahl said about the new infrastructure.

The Star Tribune used its own resources, meantime, to create its popular story commenting feature.

“I would argue that we have the best story commenting system on the Web right now,” he said. “We do require registration, but that doesn’t stop (readers) from participating because our users are open to sharing information with us in exchange for posting on the Web.”

Users can rate comments similar to the way Amazon users rate reviews, Erdahl said.

Whatever Happened to Red Swoosh?

Remember Red Swoosh, the P2P company that was bought by Akamai for $18.7 million in April 2007? Red Swoosh used to be a competitor to Akamai, albeit on a much smaller scale, offering P2P-powered content delivery services to corporate customers. Shortly before the Akamai acquisition, the company reinvented itself, rolling out products for amateur videographers and file-swapping consumers.

This new direction opened up a lot of possibilities for Akamai. In particular, it offered a way for Akamai to extend its business model to blogs and other platforms for user-generated content. Call it the CDN solution for the long tail, if you will, complete with options to enter the advertising market. But none of that materialized. Instead, it looks like most Red Swoosh products have been discontinued or taken down.


Take FoxTorrent for example. That’s Red Swoosh’s own Firefox BitTorrent extension. The service made a lot of noise when it first got released back in March of 2007, with one developer even predicting that one year down the road, FoxTorrent would be “…the most popular torrent client on the planet. The fastest. The easiest. Hands down.”

Red Swoosh later stated on its blog that these were the words of a “part-time employee…who got a wee bit too excited,” but the company continued to release updates and hint at big plans for FoxTorrent’s future. Until September, that is. FoxTorrent’s blog hasn’t been updated since, the long-promised client version 2.0 hasn’t been released and the forum — and Wiki — of the project are essentially dead.

Then there is Red Swoosh’s Edge Delivery Network (EDN), also dubbed Red Swoosh 2.0. The idea was to supplement the company’s existing corporate customer base with folks who can’t pay for professional CDN services, like bloggers and video podcasters. Users could deliver any content hosted on their web sites through Red Swoosh’s P2P technology. It was free and dead-simple: All you had to do was add a string to your links, and content would automatically be delivered via P2P, provided your users would install the Red Swoosh client.

Red Swoosh in return got a chance to grow its client install base as well as a chance to place ads on download splash pages. The service was launched in the summer of 2006, and while it’s still up and running, is almost impossible to find. Red Swoosh’s EDN home page now redirects to an Akamai.com page that makes no mention of the service. Red Swoosh’s forum as well as its developer site are also down.

And finally, there was Red Swoosh’s brief foray into the area of one-click hosting. The company quietly launched an anonymous, P2P-powered file hosting service at Upload.redswoosh.net some time last year that promised “unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads, no waiting, no ads, no spyware ” and even came with streaming video support.

One-click hosting is a highly popular, but also very controversial market. Market leader Rapidshare.com is listed as the 12th most popular web site by Alexa.com, and by its own account offers a total of 4.5 petabyte of storage to its millions of users, but has also been also the target of entertainment industry lawsuits — a risk that Akamai apparently wasn’t willing to take.

NewTeeVee discovered the Red Swoosh hosting service earlier this week and asked Akamai for a statement, only to watch the site get taken down just minutes later. Red Swoosh founder Travis Kalanick explained to us that the service was “an experimental site that the Red Swoosh team created prior to the acquisition,” and that the company decided to shut it down “to avoid any confusion on the matter.”

All of this obviously doesn’t mean that Akamai is ignoring P2P. For all we know, the company could be offering a P2P-powered CDN solution any day now. A company spokesperson told us he couldn’t get into specifics at this time, but that Akamai regards “client-side distribution as a natural evolution of our strategy and edge architecture.” He continued: “Our focus is always on enabling our customers to do more.”

The problem is that P2P isn’t just about corporate customers, but about end users. The key to gain traction in the P2P CDN market is to have a huge client install base, and for that you need consumer-related offerings, especially since it’s getting harder and harder to get consumers to install a plug-in just to access a certain site in the age of Flash-based platforms like YouTube and Hulu.

BitTorrent Inc. knows this and plans to leverage the huge and still growing popularity of uTorrent to power its BitTorrent DNA CDN. Pando became the most popular personal file-sharing service before it started to enter the CDN world. Akamai, on the other hand, has completely ignored the consumer side of P2P ever since it acquired Red Swoosh. As a result, they might just have missed the boat on P2P content delivery.