Beyond Analytics, VigLink Automates Affiliate Links to Pay Publishers
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VigLink, a San Francisco based company launched in January 2010 with the idea that "outclicks," the clicks leaving your site, have value. VigLink goes beyond analytics and tells publishers where those clicks went, measures how much value they drove downstream and claims a commission without creating any additional work for the publisher.
CBM: What is VigLink and how did you get started?
Oliver Roup: Many publishers know that merchants pay commissions for traffic you send them, but for a technology that's been around 15 years, it's shocking how rarely people do this. Amazon's program is by far the easiest to use and early crawls I did showed that less than 50% of links to them are affiliated. Think about that – people are going to all the trouble of sticking a link to Amazon in their content and not adding the simple tag to get paid.
VigLink is a service that completely automates getting paid for your content, not just with Amazon but with more than 12,500 other merchants. In 2009, I was looking for something interesting to do and I got pointed towards affiliate marketing. It seemed interesting with lots of money flying around, but there was this super-steep learning curve and lots of nomenclature. It seemed ripe for some innovation.
CBM: Who are your current clients?
Oliver Roup: Like Google AdSense, VigLink works on sites large and small across all verticals. We do particularly well in automotive, fashion, electronics, AV and entertainment. Some of our clients include eBay Motors, Tom's Hardware, Ask Andy About Clothes, Ferrari Chat and Huddler.
CBM: What are the best ways for publishers to monetize content?
Oliver Roup: There are a wide array of options available to publishers hoping to monetize their content including display ads, contextual ads like AdSense, data sales and link affiliation. VigLink is of course additive to all of the above, so even if you're pursuing all of the above strategies, installing VigLink will give you incremental revenue that doesn't compete with display ads or data sales.
CBM: Tell me a success story about content monetization.
Oliver Roup: Tom's Hardware, a popular online computer technology publication, had been successfully monetizing their site for some time, but the channels they were using didn't leverage the actual content they produced. They recognized the value of these outclicks and turned to VigLink to help them automatically affiliate these links. They set an initial goal for revenue and ended up reaching a number 4 times that fairly quickly, and with no additional time on their end.
VigLink recently closed a $5.4 million Series B financing round led by Emergence Capital, raising its total investments to $7.3 million to date including existing investors Google Ventures and First Round Capital.