Amex goes online to reach IM users

Hong Kong - Finance companies American Express and Prime Credit have taken the lead to advertise on messenger sites eBuddy and ILoveIM.com, as the popularity of instant messaging grows.

Tetris Media has recently won the exclusive right to be the display sales representative for the two instant web messengers that allow advertisers to reach more than 600,000 unique visitors per month across Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China.

Ricky Ng, business director for Tetris Media observed web-based instant messenger is becoming an increasingly popular tool due to its flexibility, integrated messenger platform and increasing corporate security level for using instant messengers.

"With its high school and office based targets, advertisers can reach the high consumption and energetic demographic group through the platform easily," he said.

Established in 2003, eBuddy.com enables visitors with leading chat services such as Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo Messenger to chat in one aggregated interface without requiring any installation. The web messenger has 12 million unique visitors per month and 600, 000 logins per day worldwide.

ILoveIM is another web messenger launched in 2004, which has more than 6 million unique visitors per month and 250,000 logins per day worldwide.