VigLink

VigLink

Industry	Marketing, Advertising
Founded	San Francisco, USA (March 2009 (2009-03))
Founder	Oliver Roup, CEO
Products	VigLink Convert, VigLink Insert, VigLink Anywhere
Services	In-text Advertising and Marketing

VigLink is a San Francisco-based, outbound-traffic monetization service for publishers, forums, and bloggers, which specializes in in-text advertising and marketing.^[1][2][3][4] VigLink CEO Oliver Roup founded the company in March 2009.^[5][6][7]

In 2012, Oliver Roup reported VigLink was working on 5 billion pages per month.^[8]

As of June 2013, VigLink has raised $7.4 million and is working with 30,000 online retailers including EBay, Target, Amazon.com, and Wal-Mart.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Service

VigLink’s content monetization solution connects potential consumers to products by hyperlinking particular keywords in a website’s content.^[1][3][7][9]

The company’s technology, VigLink Insert, scans a page for words that could be potentially profitable to the publisher of the page, and connects the keyword with a product from an affiliate program.^[3][4] The publisher is paid when a reader clicks a link contained in the content to buy or learn more about a service or product.^[3][7][12]

VigLink also offers an outbound analytics service for clients to understand where readers go when they leave their site.^[8][13][14]

Products

VigLink’s first service, called VigLink Convert, operates using a JavaScript library that customers install on their web site to identify and monetize all potential links to any of the 30,000 merchants working with VigLink.^{[8][12][14][15][16]}

The company also offers an NLP-powered link-insertion solution, VigLink Insert, to automatically insert links into a publisher’s content without detracting from reader experience.^[14][16]

VigLink Anywhere is the startup’s newest product.^[16][17] The Anywhere service is geared towards social media, allowing users to monetize links shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other channels.^[16][17]

History

Founding and early investors

Oliver Roup founded VigLink in 2009, after discovering that less than 50% of links to Amazon.com on the web were engaged in the affiliate program.^{[1][7][14][18][19]} The VigLink product was in market by January 2010.^[8]

The same month the product was released in market, VigLink received $800,000 in seed funding from First Round Capital and Google Ventures.^{[2][20][21][22][23][24]} Other investors included LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and VP for Products at LinkedIn, Deep Nishar.^{[14][20][23][25]}

Acquisitions and technological developments

In August 2010, VigLink announced it had acquired competitor company DrivingRevenue.com.^{[24][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]} The cofounder of DrivingRevenue, Raymond Lyle, became the president of VigLink.^[26][29][31] The acquisition brought over $100 million in transactions from merchandise to the company.^{[24][27][29][30][32]}

The startup closed a Series B funding round in March 2011.^{[5][33][34][35][36][37]} The $5.4 million round was led by Emergence Capital, with continued funding from Google Ventures and First Round Capital.^{[5][33][34][35][36][37]} Emergence Capital partner Kevin Spain also became a member of the VigLink board.^[34][35][37]

In November 2011, vigLink debuted the new LinkWeaver service.^{[1][38][39][40][41]} The new technology functioned to enhance VigLink’s automated link affiliation by detecting merchant and product references within a website’s content and linking them to relevant merchant pages.^{[38][39][40][41]} Contrary to alternative in-text methods, the LinkWeaver solution was designed to seek out direct merchant and product references and to avoid hyperlinking keywords to products unrelated to the website’s content.^[39][40] In April, 2013, the company renamed its LinkWeaver product to VigLink Insert.

On June 12, 2012, the company announced it had integrated with vBulletin, granting VigLink access to 100,000 forum websites.^{[42][43][44][45]} VigLink also reported that it was processing over 500 million clicks every month.^[44]

The following October, vigLink announced a new partnership with iTunes and App Store link optimization service, GeoRiot.^[46][47][48]

In May 2013, blog advertising company Skyscraper announced its partnership with VigLink.^[49]

In June, VigLink unveiled a new link optimization solution as an optional upgrade to the VigLink Convert service.^[11][50] The update modified the original URL, redirecting users to a higher profit-margin retailer.^[11][50][51]

See also

• Skimlinks
• Outbrain
• Taboola
• Zemanta

References