InPow­ered Sto­ries, the blog arti­cle adver­tis­ing plat­form, has just become a com­pa­ny in its own right. The move sees the blog net­work Net­Shel­ter – who orig­i­nal­ly host­ed the con­cept – chang­ing to be a sub­sid­uary of InPow­ered Stories.

In a move that will excite the inter­est of adver­tis­ing sales man­agers and busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers, InPow­ered seems geared to fill the gaps in earned media adver­tis­ing in a way that bears some sim­i­lar­i­ty to Google’s approach to address­ing gaps in in search adver­tis­ing.  And with inter­net adver­tis­ing rev­enues top­ping $17 bil­lion it is clear that get­ting it right is impor­tant for adver­tis­ers and plat­form providers alike. Accord­ing to Net­Shel­ter cofounder, Pey­man Nil­foroush, “The whole idea was that the earned adver­tis­ing thing is work­ing well mak­ing adver­tis­ing as seam­less as cre­at­ing a search cam­paign for a brand.”

In the orig­i­nal mod­el, InPow­ered ads were con­fined to Net­Shel­ter sites only. This meant that for­ward think­ing tech com­pa­nies could find a review on a site such as Phandroid.com then pay to have that arti­cle pro­mot­ed to peo­ple digest­ing con­tent on Net­Shel­ter sites. Those restric­tions appear to be com­ing off now though, as InPow­ered is forg­ing ahead with a pol­i­cy of con­nect­ing with oth­er ad exchanges in order to enable the run­ning of IAB stan­dard ads out­side of Net­Shel­ter’s stan­dard network.

This in itself rep­re­sents a major step for­ward in terms of gen­er­at­ing wide-chan­nel expo­sure for adver­tis­ers, but InPow­ered have also added an auto option that opens up a world of oth­er con­tent beyond Net­Shel­ter’s imme­di­ate con­fines. With this addi­tion to the port­fo­lio, brands have the facil­i­ty to enter infor­ma­tion with a strong con­nec­tion to their prod­ucts and ser­vices. The tech then gen­er­ates a report on the hottest trend­ing sto­ries from RSS feeds and Twit­ter cam­paigns, giv­ing an instant snap­shot of where the smart mon­ey should be in pro­mot­ing products.

InPow­ered are using tried and test­ed mod­els, with adver­tis­ers foot­ing a $5 charge every time pun­ters click on through to and load up an arti­cle in its entire­ty. As an extra incen­tive, adver­tis­ers are also able to go social and hook up their Face­book and Twit­ter accounts to the plat­form and pub­lish the arti­cles, open­ing up a whole new range of pos­si­bil­i­ties for intel­li­gent mar­ket­ing. Per­haps most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, busi­ness­es using InPow­ered’s plat­form will be able to gauge brand pop­u­lar­i­ty by analysing the num­ber of impres­sions gen­er­at­ed by an ad – all use­ful infor­ma­tion for online adver­tis­ing sales spe­cial­ists everywhere.