Perfect Market Inc. has raised another $9 million — bringing its total funding to $28 million — for technology and services to help publishers generate web traffic, and make more money off their content. Comcast Interactive Capital led the round, joined by the company’s existing investors: Idealab, Rustic Canyon Partners, Tribune Company and Trinity Ventures.
Chief executive and president of Perfect Market, Julie Schoenfeld, explained on Monday:
“There’s a way you look at content, and a way you look at context. Our system goes through millions and millions of articles — we’re over 17 million now — to come up with a list of possible searches that will get someone to the right story, and will make sure they don’t get an ad that’s just wrong in the context of that page.
One thing we see again and again, is that certain kinds of content has high monetization. Health and business, for example. As a publisher, you face lots more competition in certain categories from spammers. We try to at least give automated approaches that can teach publications how to set up their sites so that their content won’t be penalized.
We’ve had five quarters of…growth in revenue, page views [for our clients' content] and customer acquisitions. We’re hitting an inflection point where we need to increase our footprint quickly. Part of our cash will go towards sales and operations, and to supporting more customers. The other half will go toward further developing our platform.”
So far, Perfect Market’s customers have included: Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. Its content optimization technology addresses text content primarily, today. This year, Perfect Market aims to grow its video content optimization business, and to develop tools or acquire technologies (or startups) that can help media capitalize on location-based and mobile trends, Schoenfeld confirmed.
Currently, Perfect Market-optimized content attracts about 30 million monthly page views. That’s about 1 million monthly page views per full-time, Perfect Market employee. Investors were not available to comment on the deal ahead of publication.
Perfect Market seeks to help newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters with a web presence and other online publishers grow their revenue with little effort and no risk. Their proprietary technology solution better fulfills the needs of intent users (people who arrive at their sites through keyword searches seeking specific information) with exactly what they’re looking for in our customers’ online content. Optimized content with relevant ads generates higher click-through rates for advertisers, and dramatically more revenue for publishers and their...
Comcast Ventures ( www.comcastventures.com ) is the private venture capital affiliate of Comcast Corporation. It consists of the recently combined Comcast Interactive Capital and NBCUniversal Peacock Equity Fund. Comcast Ventures invests in innovative businesses that represent the next generation of entertainment, communications and digital technology by partnering with entrepreneurs who have the vision, passion and tenacity to succeed. Its primary goal is to generate superior financial returns through the success of its portfolio companies by applying the unique resources,...
Bill Gross started Idealab in 1996 to create and operate pioneering technology companies. The structure of Idealab has allowed us to test many ideas at once and turn the best of them into companies, attracting the human and financial capital necessary to bring them to market. Many of these companies were among the first to introduce new business ideas to the market. CitySearch, now a part of InterActive Corp., established the category of local online community directories. eToys demonstrated the...
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