VigLink is a

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

-based, outbound-traffic

monetization Monetization ( also spelled monetisation in the UK) is, broadly speaking, the process of converting something into money. The term has a broad range of uses. In banking, the term refers to the process of converting or establishing something into ...

service for

publishers Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

, forums, and bloggers. VigLink specializes in in-text advertising and

marketing Marketing is the act of acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers. It is one of the primary components of Business administration, business management and commerce. Marketing is usually conducted by the seller, typically a retailer or ma ...

. VigLink CEO Oliver Roup founded the company in March 2009. In 2012, Oliver Roup reported VigLink was working on 5 billion pages per month. As of November 2014, VigLink has raised $27.34 million and is working with 63,000 online retailers including

EBay eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...

, Target,

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

, and

Wal-Mart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores in the United States and 23 other ...

Service

VigLink's content monetization solution connects potential consumers to products by

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to Data (computing), data by a user (computing), user's point and click, clicking or touchscreen, tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to ...

ing particular keywords in a website's content. 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. The publisher is paid when a reader clicks a link contained in the content to buy or learn more about a service or product. VigLink also offers an outbound

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data, which also falls under and directly relates to the umbrella term, data sc ...

service for clients to understand where readers go when they leave their site.

Products

VigLink's first service, called VigLink Convert, operates using a

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

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. 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. VigLink Anywhere is the startup's newest product. The Anywhere service is geared towards

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

, allowing users to monetize links shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other channels.

History

Founding and early investors

Oliver Roup founded VigLink in 2009, after discovering that less than 50% of links to

on the web were engaged in the affiliate program. The VigLink product was in market by January 2010. The same month the product was released in market, VigLink received $800,000 in seed funding from

First Round Capital First Round Capital is a US-based venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan First Round typically provides seed-stage funding and focuses on po ...

and Google Ventures. Other investors included

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...

founder

Reid Hoffman Reid Garrett Hoffman (born August 5, 1967) is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and former executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily ...

and VP for Products at LinkedIn, Deep Nishar.

Acquisitions and technological developments

In August 2010, VigLink announced it had acquired competitor company DrivingRevenue.com. The cofounder of DrivingRevenue, Raymond Lyle, became the president of VigLink. The acquisition brought over $100 million in transactions from merchandise to the company. The

startup A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to ...

closed a Series B

funding round A securities offering (or funding round or investment round) is a discrete round of investment, by which a business or other enterprise raises money to fund operations, expansion, a capital (economics), capital project, an acquisition, or some oth ...

in March 2011. The $5.4 million round was led by Emergence Capital, with continued funding from Google Ventures and First Round Capital. Emergence Capital partner Kevin Spain also became a member of the VigLink board. In November 2011, VigLink debuted the new LinkWeaver service. 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. 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. In April, 2013, the company renamed its LinkWeaver product to VigLink Insert. On June 12, 2012, the company announced it had integrated with

vBulletin vBulletin is a proprietary Internet forum software package sold by MH Sub I, LLC doing business as vBulletin (formerly Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions). It is written in PHP and uses a MariaDB or MySQL database server. Similar pro ...

, granting VigLink access to 100,000 forum websites. VigLink also reported that it was processing over 500 million clicks every month. The following October, VigLink announced a new partnership with

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

and

iOS App Store The App Store is an app marketplace developed and maintained by Apple, for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS SDK. Apps can be download ...

link optimization service, GeoRiot. In May 2013, blog advertising company Skyscraper announced its partnership with VigLink. In June, VigLink unveiled a new link optimization solution as an optional upgrade to the VigLink Convert service. The update modified the original URL, redirecting users to a higher profit-margin retailer.

Reddit Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...

announced that they would begin using VigLink to redirect affiliate links in June, 2016. In February 2017, VigLink partnered with MSN to monetize its online content. In October 2019, Norton Safe Web blocked traffic redirected via Viglink and reported that the site contained identity threats.

References