Payperpost has now been around for over a year, and it’s just released news that the second round of financing is in the bag! That’s an additional funding of $7 million for further growth! This presents considerable opportunities for bloggers who are interested to get paid to blog and lots of cash for the company to be using for development, marketing and possible acquisitions.
It seems that with this announcement PPP is continuing its upswing and may soon be one of the biggest in this category of ‘paid blogging’. If that’s 125,000 posts are correct, it may already be the gorilla in the room, with the other companies: Blogsvertise, Blogitive and Loudlaunch.
I have been a member since September last year, and have been quite excited and exasperated by its performance… but this is nothing new to a startup company as it goes through the various stages of growth.
So how do you spend the $7,000,000? Well, here’s my three part program:
1. Use the money CAREFULLY to attract more advertisers… target those advertisers who are particulary au fait with the medium and who intuit WOM marketing, and select products that can enhance advertisers results especially products that are ‘cool’ – cell phones, gadgets; ‘higher margin’ – in other words, advertisers can afford to sell them on PPP; and that ‘define an online generation’ – they should identify with and want to be identified with them!
2. Invest to attract higher profile bloggers and help better PPP bloggers develop their own blogs! This relationship will help everybody. Higher profile blogger will attract readers and advertisers; PPP bloggers will benefit from the exposure and similarly become ‘desirable’. You may even wish to create a VIP PPP Blogger. The decision to open PPP Direct will serve to attract higher profile bloggers to join Payperpost is a great step in that direction! But I don’t think too many of them will be happy at the $5 rates for most PPP bloggers noted on PPP Direct. Of course, you’ll need to move beyond some of the ‘cheesy’ ads and create a better quality of advertiser, but that will come.
3. Look for bolt-on acquisitions: there are tremendous opportunities for them to purchase some of the newer style marketing companies (like TLA would be tremendous) and improving relations with companies like Google! Text Link Revenue would be a considerable boost for PPP, and for bloggers! Also, companies that help marketing blogs would be great: so you could consider buying Technorati or Digg!
Now, what about that IPO? Internet is again popular! Stocks are soaring! PPP IPO 2008! Yeah!
In the meantime, you can read more about this in the news release below, it’s the official ‘spiel’, but you can skip over that to the comments, if you really want.
- News Release
The PayPerPost Revolution Accelerates, Sponsored Blogging Marketplace Secures $7 Million Series B
Draper Fisher Jurvetson leads round and joins Board of Directors
ORLANDO, FL – (June 12, 2007) – PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers and other consumer content creators, today announced it has completed a $7 million second round investment led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an investor in the company’s Series A and one of the world’s leading high-technology venture capital firms. The financing brings the total amount of capital raised by PayPerPost to over $10 million, giving the company considerable resources for further development as the industry’s leading Consumer Generated Advertising marketplace. Additional participants in the round include existing investors Inflexion Partners and Village Ventures as well as new investor DFJ Gotham. With this investment, DFJ Managing Director Josh Stein also joins PayPerPost’s Board of Directors.
“PayPerPost created this exciting new advertising space and has established itself as the industry leader,” said Ted Murphy, chief executive officer of PayPerPost. “Although we’ve only used a portion of our first round capital, this added support from investors unlocks significant growth potential. Our content creator and advertiser ROI metrics clearly demonstrate the upside for PayPerPost’s model. We intend to use this capital to build the infrastructure, visibility and professional expertise necessary to reach and retain a greater network of advertisers and content creators than ever before.”
Since its founding in June of 2006, PayPerPost has signed more than 6,500 advertisers to its groundbreaking service, which has enabled Consumer Content Creators to be compensated for their efforts discussing specific companies, products or services via blogs, videos or other media. The content creators are required to disclose relationships with advertisers on their blog, providing transparency for the end reader. Over 125,000 Internet postings, most in the form of blogs, have already earned money for their creators through PayPerPost’s innovative marketplace. PayPerPost recently released PayPerPost Direct, a disruptive new service that allows advertisers to contract and negotiate directly with individual bloggers they identify through a safe, managed system.
“PayPerPost has laid a strong foundation for the future,” noted Tim Draper, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “It continues to attract a critical mass of participants from both the advertising and blogging communities. Analogous to Overture’s sponsored search model, we believe PayPerPost’s business model holds disruptive potential and will enable the company to thrive in the evolving paid-content arena.”
To mark the $7 million dollar funding, PayPerPost has launched a new website detailing the company’s service offering at http://www.payperpost.com. Bloggers and advertisers can easily sign up at the site and begin leveraging the self service marketplace.