VigLink is a

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

-based, outbound-traffic

monetization Monetization ( also spelled monetisation) 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 legal tend ...

service for

publishers Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

forum Forum or The Forum (plural forums or fora) may refer to: Common uses * Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States *Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city **Roman Forum, most famous example *Internet ...

s, and

bloggers A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

. VigLink specializes in

in-text advertising In-text advertising is a form of contextual advertising where specific keywords within the text of a web-page are matched with advertising and/or related information units. Description Although contextual advertising in general refers to the incl ...

and

marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

. VigLink CEO Oliver Roup founded the company in March 2009. In 2012, Oliver Roup reported VigLink was working on 5 billion

pages Page most commonly refers to: * Page (paper), one side of a leaf of paper, as in a book Page, PAGE, pages, or paging may also refer to: Roles * Page (assistance occupation), a professional occupation * Page (servant), traditionally a young mal ...

per month. As of November 2014, VigLink has raised $27.34 million and is working with 63,000 online retailers including

EBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

Target Target may refer to: Physical items * Shooting target, used in marksmanship training and various shooting sports ** Bullseye (target), the goal one for which one aims in many of these sports ** Aiming point, in field artillery, fi ...

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

, 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 from the United States, headquarter ...

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 to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wit ...

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 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 ...

. 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. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

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 that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

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 media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

, 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

. 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 is a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies. Founded by Josh Kopelman Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist. Kopelman is best k ...

and

Google Ventures GV is a venture capital investment arm of Alphabet Inc., founded by Bill Maris, that provides Seed investment, seed, Venture capital financing, venture, and Growth investing, growth stage funding to technology companies. Founded as Google Venture ...

. Other investors included

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

founder

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

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 refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend t ...

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 project, an acquisition, or some other business purpose. ...

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 produ ...

, 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 software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...

and

iOS App Store The App Store is an app store platform, developed and maintained by Apple Inc., 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 Software Deve ...

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 (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...

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