Yodle raises $12M for pay-per-call ad service for small businesses

Yodle, a New York company that seeks to help small businesses buy online ads to market themselves — as an alternative to Yellow Pages — has raised $12 million more in a second round of capital.

The company hires sales teams to call small businesses in major cities to explain its main offering, which is a pay-per-call listing service. Yodle gets paid when a user calls the business after seeing the business’ phone number online in an ad. The company claims that on average, a small business gets $12 in profit for every $1 spent with Yodle.

This adds to its previous $3 million raised. The company says it plan to grow to 5,000 customers by the end of the year, from only 1,000 now.

It joins a number of other companies doing something similar, including MerchantCircle, which just raised $10 million, and some debt to allow it to make some opportunistic acquisitions.

Yodle’s round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and included existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners.

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