VentureBeat

You usually see this logo (left) at the bottom of our posts since we use ShareThis to let readers share a story with their friends or co-workers. But it’s up top today because the San Francisco-based company has raised $15 million.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson led the round to support the promotion of the media-sharing service. The company has created a sharing button that can be easily embedded into web pages. A user clicks on the button, and it expands to give them all kinds of options to allow them to share the page with others (including submitting it to Digg, Reddit, or Mixx) through a single click. See image at left. Because it is convenient, it enables the viral spread of content across social networks, photo sites, news sites, and — yours truly — blogs.

The company launched the service in November, 2007 and saw rapid growth every month on the order of 50 percent each month. Thousands of sites have adopted it.

Now the company says it will use the new investment to roll out new services. That suggests it plans to operate a little like a Trojan Horse. It gets into your web site because of its sharing service. But once it’s there, it can add new services. Tim Schigel, the company’s CEO and a 10-year veteran of private equity firms, said in a statement that simple sharing solutions can generate great demand. The company previously raised its first round of $6 million last year from investors including Blue Chip Venture Company, Illinois Ventures, DFJ Mercury, Queen City Angels and RPM Ventures. Schigel, himself, led Blue Chip’s investment in ShareThis.

[Note: This story was originally published Tuesday evening, but a software bug caused it to disappear. We're publishing again]

Updated

Redfin is one of the more controversial web companies trying to make home buying and selling more profitable. Specifically, it’s cutting out real estate agents.

Eager to do more cutting, it has raised another $12 million, led by venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. It is expanding its listings from most West Coast cities and Boston, now adding the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

The company handles the most of the home-buying process online, effectively cutting out real estate agents who perform similar services in person. For sellers, Redfin typically charges a flat fee — of several thousand dollars– which works out to be lower than the percentage-based commission most agents charge. For buyers, the company rebates two-thirds of the commission.

Here’s the kind of headline the Seattle, Wash. company inspires: “Realtors brace for area debut of Web rival Red Fin.”

CEO Glenn Kelman makes no bones about wanting to “disrupt” the real estate industry, which he estimates to be worth over $90 billion. Other large real estate sites, such as Zillow and Trulia, also help users learn more about prospective homes, but don’t take over the role of the broker.

[Clarification:] Redfin’s business model of giving rebates to homebuyers is banned from Oregon, New Jersey and Tennessee. Additionally, the site has been fined by the Pacific Northwest regional listing office of the Multiple Listing Service, a nationwide database of home listings. It has also taken heat from the National Association of Realtors, which in many cases owns local and regional MLS offices. The reason for the fine, Kelman says, is that RedFin was altering the data after receiving it to include independent reviews by its users of the properties.

Kelman has told Congress that the MLS rules hinder innovation (official PDF here).

Realtors also charge that Redfin is taking their money by taking the information from the MLS and using it to more efficiently serve clients.

Even as they scream “unfair,” some argue people want a human touch when looking at buying or selling homes, and that such personal service will appeal to most even if the cost is slightly higher.

The company made more than one million dollars in net revenue last year — after the home-buyer rebates — but has made even more than that during just this past quarter, says Kelman.

This helped spur the investment, no doubt. Kelman said he wanted DFJ because the company needed Silicon Valley connections, and daily exposure to innovations happening here.

Besides DFJ, investors include the Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital and BEV Capital.

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.