VigLink Secures Funding From First Round Capital, Google Ventures, Angel Investors

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VigLink today announced that it has closed a seed investment from First Round Capital, Google Ventures, and individual investors including LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, longtime Google executive and current LinkedIn VP of Product Deep Nishar, and noted technology entrepreneurs Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler. The financing, which was co-led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures, will be used to accelerate VigLink's market expansion.

“Simply put, there are companies today that are leaving money on the table by not capitalizing on affiliate marketing”

Today, VigLink monetizes the ordinary hyperlink by offering an "install and forget" code snippet that automatically and transparently secures Web publishers revenue from the sites that they already link to without any changes to their customer experience.

Over 7,500 sites including Amazon.com, eBay, and many others, already pay for traffic on a commission basis totaling approximately $1.5 billion in commissions. Unfortunately, participating in these programs is labor-intensive and error-prone. VigLink research shows that less than half of all qualifying links are properly enrolled.

VigLink turns this problem on its head. A publisher embeds just a few lines of JavaScript on their page template, and VigLink invisibly modifies the page. Whenever a user clicks away from the site, the destination URL is subtly altered to credit the publisher for any resulting sales. VigLink automatically tracks the clicks and aggregates the resulting commissions for payment to the publisher.

VigLink is in closed beta and currently processing over 100 million page impressions per month. Today, Web publishers can go to VigLink's site and generate an estimate of how much revenue they could earn.

VigLink was co-founded by former MIT classmates, CEO Oliver Roup and Architect Rodrigo Leroux. Mr. Roup was formerly a Director at Microsoft and a consulting architect to the BBC. Mr. Leroux was a key architect at Flixster, Atlas Mobile (acquired by Infospace), and Edusoft (acquired by Houghton Mifflin).

"Every time a click leaves a publisher's site, value is being created, and publishers should be able to capitalize on that value," said Oliver Roup. "But our analysis shows that the complexity and labor involved are prohibitive more than half the time. VigLink has created a product that makes solving that problem transparent and effortless, not just for new content but for the back catalog as well."

"Simply put, there are companies today that are leaving money on the table by not capitalizing on affiliate marketing," according to Josh Kopelman, Managing Partner with First Round Capital. "In some cases, companies are simply unaware that there are tens of thousands of dollars each month available to them that are going uncollected because they lack the solution that VigLink brings to the table."

"We've been impressed with VigLink's monetization expertise," said Rich Miner, Partner, Google Ventures. "The solution is technically sophisticated but, like Google Analytics, it’s simple to install, and like AdSense it has the ability to scale from individual bloggers to large Web publishers. This ability to monetize any inter-domain click that’s not already an ad is a really big idea and VigLink is well positioned to lead these implementations."

"The revenue implications are impressive, but the data is key as well," added Niel Robertson. "The 'outclick' joins the pageview as a fundamental unit of measure every Webmaster needs to understand.'Where are your users going?' and more importantly, 'What are they doing when they get there?' VigLink gives unique insight into these questions."

In conjunction with this investment, VigLink also announced the appointment of Josh Kopelman, Rich Miner, and Niel Robertson to its Board of Directors, joining Mr. Roup. Mr. Kopelman is Managing Partner with First Round Capital and previously founded Half.com (acquired by eBay) and co-founded Infonautics (IPO) and TurnTide.com (acquired by Symantec.) Mr. Miner is a Partner at Google Ventures and the co-founder of Android, the mobile-platforms company acquired by Google in 2005. Mr. Robertson is a seasoned veteran of venture-backed startups and a founder of Service Metrics, acquired by Exodus Communications in 1999.