PayPerPost, which pays bloggers to write, gets $7M more
PayPerPost, the site that pays bloggers to write content about advertisers, and then gets paid by those advertisers, has raised $7 million more in financing.
This is a controversial site (see our earlier coverage. Bloggers writing rave reviews about products can sway readers into thinking that a product is actually good, but in reality it may be terrible.
In response, PayPerPost later implemented a policy forcing bloggers to disclose whether or not they’ve received money for their post.
Some five to seven percent of PayPerPost’s users dropped the service after that change, but these were replaced by ten times as many people who welcomed the change — both advertisers and bloggers, said Ted Murphy, chief executive officer of PayPerPost.
ReviewMe is a competitor. That company’s latest numbers suggested it had 750 posts, compared to PayPerPost’s 7,500 posts around the same time, according to Murphy. That’s why he’s taking so much cash: “We intend to keep it that way,” he tells VentureBeat.
He says he expects to meet this year’s revenue target of $5 million dollars, and possibly even exceed it. The company has 28,000 bloggers participating and being paid, he said. It has signed up 6,500 advertisers, he said.
Leading the latest round is Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which also led the company’s first $3 million round a few months ago. Additional participants included existing backers 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.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
