VigLink

Industry	Marketing, Advertising
Founded	San Francisco, USA (March 2009 (2009-03))
Founder	Oliver Roup, CEO
Headquarters	San Francisco
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]

See also

• Outbrain
• Skimlinks
• Taboola

References