Last week I read about VigLink‘s $800K seed round funding by Google Ventures and First Round Capital, as well as several notable individual investors such as Reid Hoffman. Danny Sullivan has a great write-up on VigLink over at Search Engine Land, but the basic gist is that VigLink helps publishers easily monetize links on their sites by offering an “install and forget” code snippet that automatically secures revenue from the sites they already link to without any visible changes to their sites. I think there is a huge opportunity here, and part of that is based on my own personal need / pain point.
In January 2009, while doing diligence for my search fund’s acquisition of Sneakerplay.com, I created a list of additional monetization opportunities for Sneakerplay. Below is a verbatim copy/paste from that document:
- Hotlink all user generated ebay, amazon, etc. links throughout the site through those affiliate programs – UPSIDE: $x growth, Level of Effort: Medium/High
- In the forums and other areas, there are thousands of user links to ebay and other sites. Like livewords, when a user adds a link to ebay/amazon, dynamically tag our affiliate tracking on the end. This will add a tracking cookie when the user clicks through and we’ll get CPA revenue if they buy anything on the merchant’s site.
Did we ever implement this? No. Why not?
- It was difficult to quantify the upside of such an implementation
- We would have had to build a custom solution which would have required quite a bit of development
By no means am I claiming to have had the original idea, I just find it funny that I previously documented a need that now looks like it is being filled by VigLink (and to be fair, others like Skimlinks as well, though I hadn’t seen them until the VigLink announcement).
I believe that VigLink is a startup to watch based on the fact that they are solving a real publisher need (help monetizing content, particularly user generated content such as user-posted links) in a market that is potentially HUGE.
