Onswipe, which optimizes websites for touch interface like the iPad, is announcing two big executive hires today — Jared Hand, who is the company’s first chief revenue officer, and Rich Bloom, its first chief operating officer.
CEO and co-founder Jason Baptiste that after a year focused on building product and signing up publishers, Hand and Bloom will lead the company’s efforts to expand its business side. Hand, who was previously vice president of sales at mobile ad company Jumptap, will be hiring an ad team. That doesn’t mean bringing on an army of sales people, Baptiste says — instead, the initial hires will focus on ad product and engineering.
“We’re a 100 percent media model,” he adds. In other words, Onswipe has “never charged for the product,” and instead makes money through revenue sharing on the tablet-optimized ads that Onswipe runs alongside the content. Hand’s goal will be to “provide something that agencies haven’t seen before on tablets.”
Bloom, meanwhile, will be in charge of publisher relations — as Baptiste says, “He knows how to speak their language.” He was vice president of video at AOL (which owns TechCrunch), a company he joined after the acquisition of video site 5min, where he was SVP of business development. (Bloom has already spent several months as Onswipe’s chief business officer, but Baptiste says the plan was always to make him COO once Hand came aboard too.)
Onswipe has been making plenty of other hires, as well. In the last 12 months, the company says it has quadrupled its headcount to 48 full-time employees. And it’s growing in other ways, increasing its publisher count by nearly 400 percent since February. Altogether those publishers have increased the number of pageviews on the platform by 344 percent since February.