Perfect Market Inc. has raised another $9 million — bringing its total funding to $28 million — for technology and services to help publishers generate web traffic, and make more money off their content. Comcast Interactive Capital led the round, joined by the company’s existing investors: Idealab, Rustic Canyon Partners, Tribune Company and Trinity Ventures.
Chief executive and president of Perfect Market, Julie Schoenfeld, explained on Monday:
“There’s a way you look at content, and a way you look at context. Our system goes through millions and millions of articles — we’re over 17 million now — to come up with a list of possible searches that will get someone to the right story, and will make sure they don’t get an ad that’s just wrong in the context of that page.
One thing we see again and again, is that certain kinds of content has high monetization. Health and business, for example. As a publisher, you face lots more competition in certain categories from spammers. We try to at least give automated approaches that can teach publications how to set up their sites so that their content won’t be penalized.
We’ve had five quarters of…growth in revenue, page views [for our clients’ content] and customer acquisitions. We’re hitting an inflection point where we need to increase our footprint quickly. Part of our cash will go towards sales and operations, and to supporting more customers. The other half will go toward further developing our platform.”
So far, Perfect Market’s customers have included: Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel. Its content optimization technology addresses text content primarily, today. This year, Perfect Market aims to grow its video content optimization business, and to develop tools or acquire technologies (or startups) that can help media capitalize on location-based and mobile trends, Schoenfeld confirmed.
Currently, Perfect Market-optimized content attracts about 30 million monthly page views. That’s about 1 million monthly page views per full-time, Perfect Market employee. Investors were not available to comment on the deal ahead of publication.
