VigLink Finds a New Way to Make Blogging Pay

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VigLink is launching today a service to help publishers take advantage of affiliate marketing offerings for sites they already link to in their normal course of writing. While many site owners may be aware that Amazon will send them a cut of revenue when they refer purchasers, just about every other e-commerce and subscription service — from The Gap to The Wall Street Journal — does, too. VigLink estimates that less than half of links that could be monetized are hooked up to affiliate programs.

The San Francisco-based company raised $800,000 in June in a round led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures and including Reid Hoffman, Deep Nishar, Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman and Micah Adler.

The thought behind VigLink is that in the course of regular writing, web publishers link to sites that they don't know have affiliate programs. Rather than requiring bloggers to sign up for each program individually, VigLink serves as the middleman. The content creators receive payments after they reach a $25 minimum for all the affiliate programs combined (a much lower barrier to entry than if they had joined all of them individually). VigLink also maintains publishers' links to make sure they hook up to current offerings.

Meanwhile, merchants are given the ability to track participating publishers and reject those whose content or audience they don't feel is appropriate. Visitors probably won't notice anything out of the ordinary as they read and click on links, unless they look very closely at the URL, said VigLink CEO Oliver Roup. His company, of course, takes a cut of any CPA revenue (and later may expand to CPC).

VigLink sent me a sample report showing that Gizmodo leaves approximately $4,400 per month on the table in unrealized income. That's not based on a relationship with the site, but an estimate from crawling its outbound links, using public traffic estimates and applying a model of how many click-throughs the site is likely to get. VigLink says it already has relationships with sites that have a combined 100 million page views per month.

The next step for VigLink is to expand beyond people who publish their own sites and blogs to places like Twitter and Facebook where bevies of users trade links. Roup hinted that this was in the plans, and said that it's actually already possible for sites like those to integrate with VigLink's open API.