VigLink

Last updated
VigLink
IndustryMarketing, Advertising
FoundedSan Francisco, USA (March 2009 (2009-03))
Founder Oliver Roup, CEO
Headquarters
San Francisco   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
ProductsVigLink Convert, VigLink Insert, VigLink Anywhere
ServicesIn-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]

Contents

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]

See also

Related Research Articles

Dotdash Meredith is an American digital media company based in New York City. The company publishes online articles and videos about various subjects across categories including health, home, food, finance, tech, beauty, lifestyle, travel, and education. It operates brands including Verywell, Investopedia, People, The Balance, Byrdie, MyDomaine, Brides, The Spruce, Simply Recipes, Serious Eats, Liquor.com, Lifewire, TripSavvy, TreeHugger, and ThoughtCo. In August 2012, About.com became a property of IAC, owner of Ask.com and numerous other online brands, and its revenue is generated by advertising. In addition to its Manhattan headquarters, Dotdash Meredith maintains offices elsewhere in the New York metropolitan area, as well as in Des Moines, Iowa, and Birmingham, Alabama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Link farm</span> Group of websites that link to each other

On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of websites that all hyperlink to other sites in the group for the purpose of increasing SEO rankings. In graph theoretic terms, a link farm is a clique. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a web search engine. Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites, and are not considered a form of spamdexing.

Affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement in which affiliates receive a commission for each visit, signup or sale they generate for a merchant. This arrangement allows businesses to outsource part of the sales process. It is a form of performance-based marketing where the commission acts as an incentive for the affiliate; this commission is usually a percentage of the price of the product being sold, but can also be a flat rate per referral.

Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google. They can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering. In Q1 2014, Google earned US$3.4 billion, or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense. In 2021, more than 38 million websites used AdSense. It is a participant in the AdChoices program, so AdSense ads typically include the triangle-shaped AdChoices icon. This program also operates on HTTP cookies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ProBoards</span>

ProBoards is a free, remotely hosted message board service that facilitates online discussions by allowing people to create their own online communities.

The anchor text, link label, or link text is the visible, clickable text in an HTML hyperlink. The term "anchor" was used in older versions of the HTML specification for what is currently referred to as the a element, or <a>. The HTML specification does not have a specific term for anchor text, but refers to it as "text that the a element wraps around". In XML terms, the anchor text is the content of the element, provided that the content is text.

Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.

nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.

A comparison shopping website, sometimes called a price comparison website, price analysis tool, comparison shopping agent, shopbot, aggregator or comparison shopping engine, is a vertical search engine that shoppers use to filter and compare products based on price, features, reviews and other criteria. Most comparison shopping sites aggregate product listings from many different retailers but do not directly sell products themselves, instead earning money from affiliate marketing agreements. In the United Kingdom, these services made between £780m and £950m in revenue in 2005. Hence, E-commerce accounted for an 18.2 percent share of total business turnover in the United Kingdom in 2012. Online sales already account for 13% of the total UK economy, and its expected to increase to 15% by 2017. There is a huge contribution of comparison shopping websites in the expansion of the current E-commerce industry.

In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website. Briefly, link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness.

Website monetization is the process of converting existing traffic being sent to a particular website into revenue. The most popular ways of monetizing a website are by implementing pay per click (PPC) and cost per impression (CPI/CPM) advertising. Various ad networks facilitate a webmaster in placing advertisements on pages of the website to benefit from the traffic the site is experiencing.

Perion Network Ltd. is a global technology company that provides digital advertising products and services. It is headquartered in Holon, Israel, with offices in Tel Aviv, New York, Los Angeles, London, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Toronto, and Kiev.

HubSpot, Inc. is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006.

A content farm or content mill is a company that employs freelance creators or uses automated tools to generate a large amount of web content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by search engines, known as SEO. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting page views, as first exposed in the context of social spam.

The Conduit toolbar was an online platform that allowed web publishers to create custom toolbars, web apps, and mobile apps at no cost. It was developed by Conduit Inc. but demerged to Perion Network. Conduit had approximately 260,000 registered publishers who have collectively created content downloaded by more than 250 million end users. Web apps and pieces of content developed through Conduit's platform can be distributed and exchanged online via the Conduit App Marketplace. As of 2010, 60 million users consumed apps from the marketplace on a daily basis.

Graphiq is a semantic technology company that uses artificial intelligence to rapidly create interactive data-driven infographics. Its intent is similar to Wolfram Alpha which is designed to provide users with direct information on a variety of subjects rather than going through a search engine.

Outbrain is a web recommendation platform founded in 2006 by co-founder and Co-CEO Yaron Galai and co-founder, Chief Technology Officer and General Manager, Ori Lahav. The company is headquartered in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oliver Roup</span> Canadian computer scientist

Oliver Roup is an entrepreneur and computer scientist originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Roup is the founder and CEO of the content monetization service VigLink.

Skimlinks is a content monetisation platform for online publishers. It specializes in automatically generating affiliate product links from content creators' commerce content, from which the content creators earn money.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Advertising revenue</span> Income from displaying online ads

Advertising revenue is the monetary income that individuals and businesses earn from displaying paid advertisements on their websites, social media channels, or other platforms surrounding their internet-based content. In September 2018, the U.S Internet advertising market was estimated to be worth $111 billion, with market share being held mostly between Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. These companies earn revenue through online advertising but also have initiated pathways for individual users and social media influencers to earn an income. Individuals and businesses can earn advertising revenue through advertising networks such as Google AdSense, YouTube monetization, or Outbrain.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Leena Rao (17 November 2011). "VigLink Debuts LinkWeaver to Help Publishers Monetize Outbound Clicks". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  2. 1 2 Alexei Oreskovic (12 January 2010). "Google's Investment Arm to Grow Partner Ranks". Reuters. Archived from the original on March 6, 2016. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Krystal Peak (13 December 2011). "Top 10 Ways to Monetize, Leverage Your Blog". VatorNews. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  4. 1 2 Brian Morrissey (17 November 2011). "Can In-Text Ads Entice More Publishers?". Digiday . Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  5. 1 2 3 Patrick Hoge (11 March 2011). "VigLink Raises $5.4 Million". San Francisco Business Times. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  6. ↑ Oliver Roup (6 February 2012). "What's the Value of a Hyperlink? Try $58,000". MissyWard.com. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Mario (12 January 2012). "Oliver Roup - Founder and CEO of VigLink". IdeaMensch. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Tony (21 February 2012). "Oliver Roup - VigLink 1 of 2". Founder LY. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  9. 1 2 Nancy F. Clark (18 February 2013). "Why is Google Ventures Investing in VigLink?". Forbes. Archived from the original on February 20, 2013. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  10. ↑ Kent Bernhard Jr. (25 June 2013). "Three Funding Lessons From VigLink Founder Oliver Roup". Upstart Business Journal. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  11. 1 2 3 Anthony Ha (13 June 2013). "VigLink's Affiliate Links Get More Up-To-Date (And Lucrative) With a New Link Optimizer". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  12. 1 2 3 Leyl Master Black (9 February 2013). "4 Steps to Monetize Your Blog Through Affiliate Marketing". Mashable. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  13. ↑ Oliver Roup (19 May 2012). "Hyperlinks Are Dumb and Bleeding Money; How to Ensure Yours Aren't". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 Kenneth Corbin (25 March 2013). "VigLink Builds Bridge Between Content and Ecommerce". eCommerce Bytes. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  15. ↑ Snurre (23 January 2013). "VigLink Review: Join Any Affiliate Program with Ease". Review Harbor. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  16. 1 2 3 4 John Ebbert (17 May 2013). "Affiliate Marketing Going 'Mainstream' Says VigLink CEO Roup". Ad Exchanger. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  17. 1 2 Justin Lafferty (1 April 2013). "VigLink Generates Revenue for Facebook Page Owners Through Link Posts". AllFacebook. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  18. ↑ Peter Coles (24 Sep 2009). "Entrepreneurial Market Design". Market Design. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  19. ↑ Rachel Swan (27 March 2013). "Haute Links: When Blogs Become Ads". SF Weekly. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  20. 1 2 Anthony Ha (12 January 2010). "With Google Backing, VigLink to Help Content Sites Make Money Off Links". VentureBeat. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  21. ↑ Thomas Claburn (12 January 2010). "VigLink Gets Google Backing". InformationWeek Security. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  22. ↑ Jason Kincaid (12 January 2010). "VigLink Raises $800K to Take Hassle Out of Affiliate Programs". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  23. 1 2 Liz Gannes (12 January 2010). "VigLink Finds a New Way to Make Blogging Pay" . Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  24. 1 2 3 Katie Deatsch (5 August 2010). "VigLink Buys Affiliate Marketing Competitor DrivingRevenue". InternetRetailer. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  25. ↑ "Google-Backed VigLink to Launch Affiliate Links Scheme". ITProPortal. 13 January 2010. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  26. 1 2 Anthony Ha (2 August 2010). "Affiliate Link Startups Team Up: VigLink Acquires DrivingRevenue". VentureBeat. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  27. 1 2 Chris Crum (3 August 2010). "Google-Backed VigLink Acquires Driving Revenue". WebProNews. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  28. ↑ "Affiliate Marketing Company VigLink Acquires Rival DrivingRevenue". Marketing Pilgrim. 3 August 2010. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  29. 1 2 3 Mark Hefflinger (4 August 2010). "Affiliate Links Start-up VigLink Acquires Driving Revenue". Digital Media Wire. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  30. 1 2 Geno Prussakov (3 August 2010). "New Acquisition: VigLink Buys Driving Revenue Inc" . Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  31. 1 2 "Google-Backed VigLink Buys Driving Revenue". Silicon Valley Business Journal. 3 August 2010. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  32. 1 2 Wade Roush (3 August 2010). "VigLink Grabs Wheel at DrivingRevenue". Xconomy. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  33. 1 2 Jason Kincaid (10 March 2011). "VigLink Raises Another $5.4 Million to Help Publishers Monetize Outbound Clicks". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  34. 1 2 3 Wade Roush (11 March 2011). "VigLink Raises $5.4 Million". Xconomy. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  35. 1 2 3 Thad Rueter (14 March 2011). "Affiliate Marketing Technology Firm VigLink Raises $5.4 Million". InternetRetailer. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  36. 1 2 "VigLink Raises $5.4 Million in Financing Led by Emergence Capital". Reuters. 11 March 2011. Archived from the original on 12 July 2013. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  37. 1 2 3 Rae Hoffman (13 April 2011). "Interview With VigLink CEO, Oliver Roup". The Sugarrae Blog. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  38. 1 2 Rachel King (17 November 2011). "VigLink Intros LinkWeaver to Boost Content Monetization on Websites". ZDNet. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  39. 1 2 3 Brad McCarty (17 November 2011). "VigLink Launches LinkWeaver to Make In-Text Ads Less Annoying and More Focused". The Next Web. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  40. 1 2 3 Tammy Wolf (17 November 2011). "VigLink Unveils LinkWeaver, Content Monetization Technology for Website Publishers". TMCnet.com. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  41. 1 2 Matthew Schwartz (29 November 2011). "LinkWeaver Offers New Alternative for Publishers Looking to Monetize Their Websites". BtoB Media Business. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  42. ↑ Bambi Francisco Roizen (12 June 2012). "VigLink Integrates with vBulletin to Access 100k Forums". VatorNews. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  43. ↑ Murray Newlands (13 June 2012). "VigLink Wins vBulletin". Performance Marketing Insider. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  44. 1 2 Shawn Collins (16 June 2012). "vBulletin 5 Connect Integration with VigLink". Feed Front. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  45. ↑ Murray Newlands (15 June 2012). "vBulletin Announces VigLink Integration with vB 5.0 at ForumCon". The Admin Zone. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  46. ↑ Khanhumayun (22 October 2012). "Affiliate Platform VigLink Partners with GeoRiot to Enable Location-Based Referrals". Humayun Khan's Writing Portfolio. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  47. ↑ Simon Holland (October 2012). "VigLink Upgrades iTunes Affiliate Links". PerformanceIN. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  48. ↑ Clyde Smith (26 October 2012). "Worldwide iTunes Affiliate Links Via GeoRiot & Related Tools for Musicians". HyperBot. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  49. ↑ Frederic Lardinois (28 May 2013). "Blog Monetization Service Skyscraper Comes Out of Closed Beta, Adds VigLink Integration & Wordpress Plugin". TechCrunch. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  50. 1 2 Shawn Collins (14 June 2013). "New Link Optimizer Technology from VigLink". Shawn Collins Consulting. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  51. ↑ Shawn Collins (15 June 2013). "New Link Optimizer Technology from VigLink". Feed Front. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  52. ↑ "Affiliate links on Reddit". 6 June 2016.
  53. ↑ Brown, Eileen. "MSN partners with VigLink to unlock new revenue streams from existing content". ZDNet. Retrieved 2018-06-11.
  54. ↑ "Report for viglink.com". Norton Safe Web. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.