San Jose-based Pudding Media, a developer of technology that puts contextual advertising around voice communications, has raised an $8 million first round from Opus Capital and BRM Capital. The company, which is marketing its services to VoIP operators, mobile carriers and web-based voice services, sees ads as a way to subsidize the cost of voice communications. The funding announcement touts this as an “entirely new market category,” but it really isn’t. Ad-subsidized voice has been floating for a while with little interest, it seems, from consumers. The innovation may be the contextual part—meaning the ads are derived from the content of the conversation—but if GMail raised hackles for ads based on text content, this is sure to make folks uncomfortable. Release.

The company has put up a test site to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology, though VentureBeat wasn’t impressed by a September review.