Oliver Roup, Founder and CEO, VigLink, answer some of our questions about growing business segments, challenges, link disclosure and more.
Are there particular segments or verticals that are rapidly adopting your service? If so, what are they and why?
Our clientele really run the gamut -we have publishers of all types using VigLink and seeing great results. But, we have seen concentrated areas of success working with publishers whose content is focused on the automotive, electronics, fashion and entertainment sectors. One of the reasons why is we’ve had a few key clients signup in each of these areas and others have tended to follow. Another is that these types of publishers are able to create clear “intent” around these areas of interest. Intent translates into sales. Sales translate into happy publishers and beget more happy publishers and happy merchants.
What are some of the challenges that your business is currently facing?
We’re focused heavily on publisher outreach and education at the moment. One of the biggest challenges we face as a business is a lack of awareness around the value of the traffic leaving a publisher’s site and the ways they can monetize those outclicks. Even in scenarios where publishers know they should be doing something to monetize content, it often seems too tedious and they aren’t aware that there are automated performance marketing services available to help them.
Are there technical developments coming down the pike that will allow for expansion of your service? If so, how?
Yes, we just closed a Series B round of financing that will allow us to expand our product development team and roll out some pretty exciting new features. On-deck we have link insertion, which is currently in beta release. At the request of a publisher the feature will insert sensible links into content, augmenting existing links and delivering an incremental revenue increase to both the publisher and merchant.
Have regulations regarding link disclosure or privacy impacted your business in any way?
We’ve encouraged our publishers to publicly disclose the use of VigLink on their site since the company’s inception. As it has become clearer what the FTC rules really mean, we have begun to provide more in depth guidance and tools to our publishers in regards to best practices for disclosure and to assist them in disclosing.
What are some of the biggest hurdles facing the overall performance marketing space over the next 12 months?
I think the biggest hurdle facing the space in the next 12 months will be the anti-affiliate tax legislation being considered in a number of states, including California where we’re headquartered. It is understandable that lawmakers are looking for new sources of revenue in tough economic times, but these laws create a drop in tax revenue and an exodus of jobs from the state. California in particular has seen technology innovation as the engine of economic prosperity and cannot afford to lose these kinds of jobs.