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After months of talks and planning, the Mercury News and Zvents are officially announcing a partnership today where Zvents powers the Merc’s online events listings. It’s a pretty big deal for both companies. For the Merc, it streamlines its event listings process and, for the first time, allow users to submit events directly into its system. And for Zvents, it’s their first big media partnership launch. The first iteration of the partnership is here.
Media partnerships such as these are key to the Menlo Park start-up’s business model, and Zvents will try to use the Merc deal to leverage other partnerships. The company’s backed by NetService Ventures Group and Red Rock Ventures.
Now, the disclaimer: In my new role at the Merc, I (Mike) participated in several of the Zvents-Mercury News planning meetings and helped facilitate meetings with other events vendors. I had little to do with the actual implementation of the new service, though.
One Comment
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Bruce Dobie said:
mike, i have a couple of questions. i am sure that prior to this arrangement the merc news had a ton of listings in its database already. some of these listings they had to input manually, using information provided to them by fax or e-mail. are the editorial staffers now using the zvents submission form to enter all of this data for publication not only at the paper’s website but in the print edition? and once these events are powered by the zvents listings form into a database, do these events then go not only into the paper’s database but into a zvents database? in other words, can a user at zvents now find what he would otherwise have found in the paper? finally, what does the paper pay for this? or does zvents simply offer the service for free, knowing that it will be aggregating more listings this way? thanks, bruce dobie/nashville, tn.
