ReleaseMyAd
ReleaseMyAd is a Kolkata-based online advertising platform that lets individuals and businesses book advertisements in newspapers and other traditional media without visiting an agency office or a newspaper's advertising department in person. Its core promise is simple to state and, in the Indian context, significant: a process that historically depended on personal contacts, printed rate cards and repeated phone calls is turned into a searchable, priced and payable online transaction. The platform is described in the batch record for this directory as accredited by the Indian Newspaper Society, and its own current newspaper pages repeat that accreditation, presenting it as an authorised booking platform rather than an informal reseller. For a directory of Indian news agencies and media services, ReleaseMyAd belongs not with newsgathering wires but with the commercial infrastructure that keeps print journalism funded — the classified and display advertising market that newspapers have relied on for generations.
Overview and what the platform does
At its heart, ReleaseMyAd is a marketplace and booking desk combined. An advertiser chooses a newspaper, an edition and a category or format, sees a rate, supplies the text or artwork for the advertisement, chooses dates, pays online and receives confirmation and, on its current pages, a GST invoice for the order. The company's own newspaper pages state that it has published more than twelve lakh advertisements across more than 2,400 newspaper editions for individuals and businesses, and that payments are handled through secured payment channels. Those figures are the company's own, and they convey the scale it claims for a business that began with a much narrower offer. The service is aimed equally at a person placing a single personal notice and at a local business placing regular print advertisements, a breadth that distinguishes it from large media agencies, which have traditionally concentrated on bigger accounts.
Founding in Kolkata in 2009
ReleaseMyAd was launched in Kolkata in 2009 by Sharad Lunia. Profiles of the founder published by YourStory and MediaNama describe a career spent in and around advertising before the venture: Lunia graduated in marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, worked with Saatchi & Saatchi in New York and then spent more than two years with Microsoft's Digital Advertising Solutions Group in New York before returning to his home city of Kolkata. YourStory's account dates the launch to Valentine's Day in 2009 and explains the timing in terms of the first use case the team had in mind — enabling people to place Valentine's messages in newspapers. The same account says the venture began with a team of six people, servicing only newspaper classified bookings through its online platform, and that an early fourteen-day promotion on Facebook brought in its first twelve customers. From that deliberately small start, the team later grew to dozens as the product range widened.
How newspaper booking works on the platform
The practical workflow is the product. A user starts from a newspaper or a category rather than from a blank enquiry, compares editions and rates, and builds the advertisement inside the platform. For classified advertisements — the small text notices that have long filled the back pages of Indian newspapers — the platform calculates price from the newspaper's own charging basis and helps the user compose the text. For display advertisements, early descriptions of the service noted that customers could upload or design their advertisements themselves, supplying logos, images and fonts, work that previously required a professional designer or an agency's studio. ReleaseMyAd says it powers booking systems for some of India's largest newspapers in English, Hindi and other languages, which means that, for those titles, its interface effectively sits inside the newspaper's own commercial operation rather than merely alongside it. Free help with writing an advertisement, a live chat desk and telephone support are offered on its current pages as part of that hand-holding role.
From classifieds to a wider media offer
Although newspapers came first, the company did not stay a single-medium business. Its founder described the progression in interviews: starting with classifieds, it built a base of local businesses that returned to place regular print advertisements, and then it moved into display advertising and other media. A radio service, releaseMyAd.fm, was introduced as a separate online platform for brands wanting to advertise on FM radio, letting advertisers build campaigns by city, duration, time of day and day of week, with creative services such as jingles and voice-over composition offered alongside the media booking. The wider platform has also been described as assisting advertisers with cinema and magazine advertising. In an interview summarising its pitch, the company framed its work as solving three problems for advertisers: discovering the right medium, obtaining the lowest workable price, and executing the booking — listing, at that time, more than two hundred newspapers, a set of radio stations and multiplex chains among the options it could present to a client.
The All India Radio connection
One of the more notable institutional milestones in the company's history was its appointment by All India Radio as the broadcaster's first virtual advertising agency, authorised to accept and process radio advertisement bookings for its network. Indian Television reported the arrangement and listed the AIR services involved as including Akashvani, Vividh Bharati, FM Rainbow and FM Gold. AIR's additional director general at the time described the initiative as part of the broadcaster's web-enabled services, intended to improve utilisation of inventory — including last-minute inventory that might otherwise go unsold — and to augment revenue. For ReleaseMyAd, the appointment mattered because it showed the same online-booking logic being applied to a large public broadcaster's inventory, not only to private newspapers and FM stations, and because it positioned a Kolkata startup as an intermediary for one of the country's most extensive radio networks.
Serving local and small advertisers
A recurring theme in interviews with the founder is the decision to stay focused on local and regional advertisers. Lunia told exchange4media that a large share of the company's queries came from local advertisers and that the platform was consciously designed for them, rather than chasing only national accounts. He made a similar point about radio, noting that much radio advertising in India is local in nature and that many businesses wanted to use the medium but did not know how to begin. That focus explains the product design: transparent rates, small minimum transactions, help with copy and creative, and the ability to complete a booking entirely online or with telephone assistance. It also explains the company's value to newspapers themselves. Classified and small display advertisements are individually modest but collectively important to print titles, especially regional and city editions, and an online channel that aggregates thousands of such small buyers can deliver revenue that a newspaper's own sales force would find expensive to chase one advertiser at a time.
Accreditation, company identity and footprint
Trust is a central concern when money is collected online on behalf of established newspapers, and ReleaseMyAd leans heavily on formal markers of legitimacy. It describes itself as an INS-accredited agency — the Indian Newspaper Society being the long-standing industry body for newspaper publishers — and its current pages give a registered office address at 7 Red Cross Place, Kolkata 700001, together with a registered company name and GST identification, and state that it has branches in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore in addition to the Kolkata office. Earlier press material gave a Loudon Street, Kolkata address and described releaseMyAd.com as a service of a fully accredited INS advertising agency whose core team included graduates of Wharton and other premier institutes with experience at companies such as Microsoft and Google in the United States and India. The details have changed as the company has grown, but the pattern is consistent: a Kolkata-headquartered operation presenting itself as a formal, accredited part of the newspaper industry rather than an outsider disrupting it from beyond the fence.
Role in the Indian news ecosystem
ReleaseMyAd's significance for the news ecosystem is indirect but real. Indian newspapers, particularly in regional languages and smaller cities, have always depended on a long tail of classified and local display advertising — recruitment, property, education, retail, personal notices and local services — alongside national brand campaigns. As classified spending migrated toward online listing platforms, an online booking layer for print itself gave newspapers a way to keep a share of that demand inside their own pages and gave advertisers a reason to keep print in their plans. By lowering the transaction cost of buying a newspaper advertisement to something closer to buying a train ticket, ReleaseMyAd helped keep that long tail commercially viable. It also generated, as a by-product, a large body of comparable rate and edition information across thousands of newspaper editions, of the kind that media directories and planners themselves rely on.
Notable facts and developments
Several facts recur across independent profiles and together give a sense of the company's trajectory. It started in 2009 with six people and newspaper classifieds only. Within a few years it reported having serviced more than 115,000 advertisers, a figure later profiles raised to more than 150,000, while its own current pages claim more than twelve lakh advertisements published. It expanded from text classifieds into display, radio, cinema and magazines. It built a dedicated radio platform and creative services rather than treating radio as an afterthought. It was appointed All India Radio's first virtual agency. And its founder also launched a matrimonial classifieds venture, findMyMatch, applying the same print-web-mobile logic to a single classified category — a reminder that classified advertising, often dismissed as a legacy business, was fertile ground for early Indian internet entrepreneurship.
How to access and use ReleaseMyAd
ReleaseMyAd is accessed through its website, releasemyad.com, and through the large family of newspaper-specific booking pages that sit under its domain, each presenting rates and booking options for a particular title and category. A typical user selects a newspaper and edition, chooses between classified and display formats, enters or uploads the advertisement content, picks publication dates, reviews the price and pays online, with support available through live chat and by telephone from the Kolkata office. Businesses that advertise repeatedly can use the platform as a standing booking desk across many titles rather than maintaining separate relationships with each newspaper. For readers of this directory, the practical point is that ReleaseMyAd is not a news source and does not publish editorial content of its own; it is a transaction layer for the advertising that supports news publishing, and it is best understood — and used — on those terms.
