Lijit Closes $7.1 Million Series C Round
Lijit Closes $7.1 Million Series C Round – Readies Advertising Network – ReadWriteWeb
Written by Frederic Lardinois / August 12, 2008 11:13 AM / 1 Comments
lijit_logo.jpgLijit, which provides search services to bloggers and blog networks, announced today that it has closed a $7.1 Million series C round led by Foundry Group. Lijit had raised a small Series A round in January of 2007 and a larger $3.3 million Series B in July 2007. With this new round, Lijit is planning to use this new influx of money to finance the launch of its search-powered ad network.
Congrats to Todd Vernon and all our friends at Lijit!
Where’s the party? 
Techcrunched and Touchdown!
SocialMedia Networks Takes $3.5 Million Series A
Social network platform provider SocialMedia Networks has taken $3.5 million Series A in a round led by Charles River Ventures that also included Marc Andreessen and Jeff Clavier (founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC). CRV had previously seed funded the company with $500,000.SocialMedia Networks provides a suite of tools and services for developers building applications that run on social networking platforms including Facebook and MySpace.
SocialMedia Network’s Appsaholic sells click-throughs to other Facebook applications across a network of affiliated sites, a similar model to FBExchange’s link exchange model, but has more features (reporting) and seems easier to use (FBEx requires separate filings, Appsaholic can use PayPal).
George Zachary of Charles River Ventures said that the investment “underscores the significant opportunity for SocialMedia Networks to become the new standard for how social networks are monetized.”
Touchdown with 14:40 left in the first quarter! It feels so good, but there is a lot of football left to played! Stay tuned! 
Technorati Tags: Social Media, SocialMedia
Read MoreSocialMedia in Business 2.0
Mini moguls: Goldstein and partner David Gentzel run SocialMedia, one of the biggest startups dedicated to Facebook apps.
Armed with those sorts of insights, some startups are positioning themselves as Facebook app factories. “Netscape browsed the Web, Yahoo organized it, Google searched it, and now Facebook has made it social,” says Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia, a small shop in Mill Valley, Calif., that’s already turned out such Facebook hits as FoodFight (throw a virtual lobster at your buddy) and Happyhour (send that buddy a cocktail). How does he plan to cash in on all those widgets?
At the moment, advertising opportunities are unproven – which is why Goldstein is leaning toward sponsorship as a simpler path to profits. FoodFight, Goldstein says, is an ideal mechanism for food companies to market themselves. Instead of throwing a chicken drumstick at a friend, a user could throw, say, a drumstick sponsored by Tyson Foods. “I had an ad agency representing a buffalo wings chain approach us with an $80,000 ad buy,” Goldstein says. “It’s starting to happen.”
Unproven… oh do I love the challenge of unproven… I can remember not so long ago when the Internet was an unproven ad medium and most ad agencies and clients didn’t even know what the Internet was? That’s only 12 years ago. Today billions of ad dollars are shifting from traditional media to the Internet.
Here’s what is proven. If you need to reach Gen Y. If this audience is important to you or your client. And guess what, this audience is critical to all brands because in 10 years they will be in full spending mode as young adults. Then you need to be testing unproven media right now. Why? because you can’t reach this audience in proven media. You can’t reach this audience with traditional media and you can’t reach this audience with traditional advertising. You also can’t reach this audience efficiently on the traditional web – the web today demographically is everyone.
However, you can reach and engage with this audience very efficiently on Social Networks. Facebook’s open social os enables marketers through social applications to engage directly with Gen Yers in their native social environment. It also enables marketers to engage with networks of Gen Y friends via the social graph.
You want an engaging, word of mouth, viral, Gen Y reaching medium? Well it’s here to today unproven or not. 10 years from now it will be just like Internet Advertising is today – the dominate marketing medium. Why? Because it will reach the dominant car and home buying generation.
Marketers come test and learn with us now! If you want to discover and learn more about this NEW new media please contact us at SocialMedia.
If you want to help us build and evangelize this NEW new media then contact me david at socialmedia dot com. We’re looking for a few special people who want to build a new medium. These opportunities only happen once every 12 years or so. Now is the time!
Technorati Tags: advertising 2.0, Facebook, SocialMedia
Read MoreRecent Facebook Platform Articles of Interest
Recent Facebook Articles:
SocialMedia Raises $1M for Facebook App Network
http://mashable.com/2007/08/14/socialmedia-2/
Widgets Spawn Industry Events, Communities and Branded Chicken Wings
http://www.clickz.com/3626748
Social-Networking Site Becomes Virtual Frat House for Marketing Pooh-Bahs – AdAge
http://adage.com/article?article_id=119822
Would You Let These People Friend You? – AdAge
http://adage.com/print?article_id=119841
Madison Avenue Stampedes Onto Facebook – takes a while to download
Video – Madison Avenue Stampedes Onto Facebook
Facebook Grows Up – Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227872/site/newsweek/
Technorati Tags: Facebook, Facebook Platform, SocialMedia Networks, SocialMedia
Read MoreSocialMedia and the next NEW MEDIA
In a time not long ago, media was all about content (video, audio and text), ads, impressions, pages, links and keywords.
Then on 5/24/07 F8 changed the world!
Media now, at least for the “social networker” gen y generation, is all about social engagement. Like the boomers embraced television 50 years ago, the gen y-ers are embracing social networks today.
Welcome to Media 2.0!
My partner Seth Goldstein writes: Google died on May 24, 2007
Of course Google didn’t die on 5/24/07, but like Netscape’s browser challenged Microsoft’s dominance a decade earlier, the social network platform will challenge Google’s dominance today. It won’t happen overnight, but the seeds have been sewn. Just as they were sewn for Microsoft a decade ago. We’re transitioning from a web of content to a web of people – from pagerank to social graph.
In 1995, I had the great privilege of helping to launch DoubleClick. I was their very first VP of Sales. At that time total Internet advertising for 4th quarter 1995 was a mere $75M. No one could have ever predicted the impact that Internet Advertising would have on all Media and Advertising. We knew it would have ifluence. We had no conception of the magnitude – not in our wildest dreams!
Today we are launching www.socialmedia.com the first Social Application Network. The parallels are uncanny!
-Dramatically changing consumer behavior
-Explosive growth
-A new and vastly different media and marketing medium
Are we at another tipping point? Only time will tell.
My intent 10 years ago at DoubleClick was to help create the most accountable advertising medium ever.
My intent today is:
1> to help create the most engaging, viral and attention respectful medium ever
2> to help create value for social application developers – a revenue stream – ROD – return on development
3> to help create value (efficiency and effectiveness) for marketers – ROI – return on investment
4> to help create value for users – advertising as a service – ROA – return on attention
ROD + ROI + ROA = success
So far the evolution of the Web is….
1995 Netscape opened the Web
1996 DoubleClick Networked Advertising on it
1999 Yahoo! organized it
2003 Google searched it
2007 Facebook made it social
We hope we can add this to the list some day.
2007 SocialMedia Networked Engagement on it
What an amazing time to be in startup again! I’ve been blessed again….
Technorati Tags: advertising 2.0, Advertising as a Service, Attention, DoubleClick, Media 2.0, networked engagement, Return on Attention, social graph, SocialMedia
Read MoreThe Attention Economy Has it’s 1st B Round – Congrats to Kimbal, David, Robert and Peter
Me.dium Secures $15M Series B – The Dawn of Collaborative Browsing?
Wow a $15M B round for Me.dium! This is huge for the Attention space (investor validation), the browser extension space (more validation beyond StumbleUpon), and the local Boulder startup community (big things can happen for startups in this space (the ATTENTION CONSUMER space) in Boulder!
Huge congratulations to the founders Robert Reich, David Mandell and Peter Newcomband, and to Kimbal Musk, who saw the opportunity, brought it to Boulder, and I’m sure played a huge role in getting both the A and B rounds done.
Now the fun really begins or …..the pressure is on depending how you want to look at it.
Success is not measured in VC dollars alone! Although $15M ($20M if you count the A round) is nice cushion to figure it out, I’m still (and I’m the optimist here) trying figure out how they plan to scale and make money? I’m sure they are just playing close to the vest with all this.
Obviously, there’s a plan and some very prominent VCs who believe it! So this will be extremely interesting to watch play out over the next few…years.
Once again Congrats to the whole Me.dium team!
I stand by my original quote:
“See where we’re headed? Me.dium is on to something … and it could be HUGE!”
Technorati Tags: Attention, Boulder, Me.dium
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