Bolt Man Back with Casual Gaming Ad Network

Nearly a year after his previous company went bankrupt following a failed acquisition bid, Jay Gould is back. The founder and former president of Bolt Media has launched Gamers Media, a vertical ad network targeting the online casual gamer market.

Operating in a quiet mode for the past six months, Gamers Media represents 40 casual gaming sites, including BigFishGames and Gamesville, and uses Adify’s ad platform. By targeting long tail casual gaming sites, Gamers Media will have more flexibility in the types of ads placements it can offer its customers, according to Gould.

“We do advergames, homepage takeovers and all the stuff you’re not going to see on the top portal sites anymore because they are doing only IAB standard advertising,” said Gould, Gamers Media CEO. “It’s a very niche category. We’re a much more nimble team.”

Gould was previously with Bolt Media, a youth media network that was to be acquired by video network GoFish for approximately $30 million a year ago. The deal fell through, however. Bolt was sued by Universal Music Group and others at the time for content usage violations. GoFish had a previous relationship with Universal Music Group, and was able to broker a settlement between the companies, according to Tabreez Verjee, president of GoFish. Still, GoFish was unable to arrange similar deals with the other firms suing Bolt. Bolt eventually filed for bankruptcy and was dissolved.

“You have to pay everybody their piece of the pie,” said Verjee. “We couldn’t afford to purchase Bolt because their liability attached to the music industry was too high.”

While at Bolt Media, it was Gould’s business relationship with gaming site Miniclip.com, now the premier title of GoFish’s recently-launched kids ad network, that inspired him to launch Gamers Media, he said.

“We did have a lot of experience with advertising and selling gaming [at Bolt],” Gould said. “Now we help the advertisers find the hard-to-reach gamers on the nontraditional properties.”