Hark Announces New Senior Vice President of Business Development and Strategy

SEATTLE -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Hark, the world’s sound bite platform, today announced the hiring of Jeremy Laws, a former Senior Vice President of Digital Platforms and Head of Mobile for Universal Pictures. Most recently, Laws was the Head of Monetization for IMDb at Amazon, where he managed all revenue-generating activities.

“The addition of Jeremy to our team is a huge win,” said Hark CEO David Aronchick. “Not only is he a powerful connector and innovator, he cut his teeth in an industry that provides Hark with the bulk of its content. The very people we have been trying to sell and create partnerships with have been close contacts of his for over 20 years.”

Laws played a significant early role at MGM and Universal Pictures by leveraging entertainment content on digital platforms, and created and ran Universal’s mobile group. He also created a variety of lucrative innovations in the film clip business, including a groundbreaking online licensing system that earned him the title “change champion” in a Gartner case study.

"Everything I’ve learned about the passion consumers have for engaging with short form entertainment content tells me that there is a huge opportunity here,” said Laws. “My goal at Hark is to ensure that fans of movie, television and sports sound bites have easy access, on any device, to a broad range of super-compelling, high quality, licensed content and that we are developing new revenues steams for our shareholders and content partners."

Hark, a top-10 entertainment site according to comScore, offers a product library of more than three million audio sound bites that can be accessed and shared across multiple devices and social media platforms. According to Quantcast, more than 35 million consumers worldwide visit Hark each month to find their favorite pieces of pop culture content by searching across hundreds of data points, including actor, character, subtitles and many more.

About Hark

Hark is the world’s platform for sound bites, where users can discover, create, play and share their favorite audio moments anywhere on any device through digital embedding, or via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Founded in 2007 by David Aronchick and Fouad ElNaggar, Hark is the top ranking, independent entertainment website on the Internet (comScore, 2012). Hark is headquartered in Seattle, Wash. For more information, please visit www.hark.com.

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