Music streaming site Dhingana launches advertising platform; Facebook's product director Gokul Rajaram joins advisory board

Music streaming site Dhingana has launched an advertising platform to help brands reach its listeners of for Indian music around the world.

As part of this initiative, the company has also named Gokul Rajaram, Facebook's current product director of advertising and the creator of Google's AdSense to its advisory board.

Snehal Shinde, CEO of Dhingana said in a statement, "Globally, over 11 million Indian music fans listen to music on Dhingana. We believe that this is a great motivation for brands looking at innovative avenues to reach out to them. This led us to develop a highly intuitive advertising platform."

The service will help advertisers such as movie production studios, music labels, independent musicians, mobile carriers and any other brands that want to reach its audience. Right now, it is offering a number of ad formats providing options to target ads based on factors like music genre, platform, geo-location and audience demographics.

Talking about Rajaram's inclusion in the board, Swapnil Shinde, COO of Dhingana, said, "He has extensive experience in creating user-friendly and highly profitable experiences for social and mobile platforms."

Prior to joining Facebook, Rajaram spent five years as the product Management director of Google's Adsense. He also ran a startup, Chai Labs, that was later acquired by Facebook.

Rajaram is an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, an MS in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin and a B Tech from IIT-Kanpur.

As part of beta testing of the platform, Dhingana ran a campaign for the Hindi film, Cocktail, claiming to drive 100,000 audio streams of the ad in the first 18 hours, and more than 1 million streams in the first five days.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)