VigLink. It may not become the word of the decade, but it has Google power behind it. The San Francisco-based company announced it has closed a seed investment from Google Ventures, among many others. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
VigLink’s high-profile list of investors also includes First Round Capital, and individual investors such as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, longtime Google executive and current LinkedIn Vice President of Product Deep Nishar, and noted technology entrepreneurs Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler. The financing, which was co-led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures, will be used to accelerate VigLink’s market expansion.
VigLink has gained attention for its ability to monetize an ordinary hyperlink via an “install and forget” code snippet. This snippet automatically and transparently secures web publishers revenue from the sites they already link to without any changes to their customer experience.
“We’ve been impressed with VigLink’s monetization expertise,” said Rich Miner, a partner at Google Ventures. “The solution is technically sophisticated but, like Google Analytics, it’s simple to install, and like AdSense it has the ability to scale from individual bloggers to large web publishers. This ability to monetize any inter-domain click that’s not already an ad is a really big idea and VigLink is well positioned to lead these implementations.”
Addressing Affiliate Pain Points
VigLink aims to solve a pain point in the affiliate marketing industry. By its measure, more than 7,500 sites, including Amazon.com and eBay, already pay for traffic with commissions totaling about $1.5 billion. However, the company said participating in these programs is labor-intensive and error-prone. VigLink research shows that less than half of all qualifying links are properly enrolled.
“Simply put, there are companies today that are leaving money on the table by not capitalizing on affiliate marketing,” said Josh Kopelman, managing…