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  • Evolve Media Acquires Content Exchange Engine Crowd Ignite For $1 Million

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Friday, June 10th, 2011

    Digital media company Evolve Media has acquired Crowd Ignite, a content exchange engine that contextually connects audiences of similar interests, the company announced this morning. The price it paid was not disclosed, with TechCrunch has learned that the deal value was low: $1 million in cash, equity and earn-out commitments, to be precise.

    Crowd Ignite enables publishers within defined audience verticals to share their content within a closed network, thereby exposing their content to relevant users on other sites and allowing them to acquire new users and grow their audience.

    Crowd Ignite’s proprietary technology is able to track which pieces of content within a site are the most popular, present it to users on sites within the network and then optimize the landing page in a way that presents the content they are most likely to want to consume.

    Crowd Ignite has over 300 publishers participating across such verticals as women, fashion, parenting, movies, gaming, and male-lifestyle.

    This is where the acquisition makes sense. Evolve Media combines an ad sales business (Gorilla Nation), a video solution (Springboard) and an interactive marketing business unit (Double Helix) with a publishing business (AtomicOnline), which includes such properties as SheKnows, CraveOnline, TheFashionSpot, GameRevolution and Momtastic in its portfolio.

    The Crowd Ignite team will continue to run day-to-day operations post acquisition.

    The company’s founder and creator, Jake Moilanen, will continue as MD.

    Launch Date: 2001

    Evolve Media LLC. (http://www.evolvemediallc.com/) is a vertical content publishing company that leverages proprietary advertising and publishing technologies to build publishing brands under its CraveOnline Media (men) and TotallyHer Media (women) business units. Evolve offer marketers superior custom, integrated and engaging solutions that allow them to reach and impact its audience of more than 95 million people globally each month (comScore). Recognizing that no person is defined by any one interest, Evolve publishes an extensive portfolio of enthusiast...

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