Where is the smart money going in content advertising?
Taboola raised $15 million from Evergreen Venture Partners, Marker, Pitango Venture Capital and WGI Group in February and has an algorithmic engine at the heart of its content distribution platform which is now embracing branded content and moving into video. Outbrain has been well funded for some time ($41 million raised in 2012) and also bought content marketing and editing tools companies, Visual Revenue and Scribit earlier this year – a move allowing it to offer brands and editors tool for creating their own content for distribution via the Outbrain network.
Video networks such as Base79 (which just raised $10 million) and Rightster (planning a rare UK tech IPO) are also now getting in on this act with brokering video content between publishers and publishers – we expect this to be a next phase of growth.