Meebo has officially launched "Sponsors," which is a custom Meebo room that a company can use in order to reach out to Meebo users, and Meebo can earn some additional revenue.
Companies will pay Meebo in order to get their own meebo room, where they can introduce new content and products to users. The hope is to get some users to talk about the new product, and the company can get some feedback directly from users. This "sponsors" tool also presents a platform by which companies can offer meebo buddy icons and skins, which can be incorporated into your own personal Meebo presence. The chat rooms can of course be embedded into MySpace, hi5, Piczo, and the rest.
This sounds a lot like the branded Meebo rooms that were launched earlier this year, but the point of differentiation seems to be that "sponsor" rooms are presented as a form of advertisements with your existing meebo chat client. You can choose to check out the sponsor's message, or close the message completely.