VigLink |
| Industry | Marketing, Advertising |
|---|
| Founded | San Francisco, USA (March 2009 (2009-03)) |
|---|
| Founder | Oliver Roup, CEO |
|---|
| Headquarters | |
|---|
| 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. VigLink 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 November 2014, VigLink has raised $27.34 million and is working with 63,000 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 iOS 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]
Reddit announced that they would begin using VigLink to redirect affiliate links in June, 2016.[52] In February 2017, VigLink partnered with MSN to monetize its online content.[53]
In October 2019, Norton Safe Web blocked traffic redirected via Viglink and reported that the site contained identity threats.[54]
