Kontera Raises $15.5M For Annoying In-Text Advertising Technology

In-text advertising technology provider Kontera has raised $15.5 million from its current investors Sequoia Capital, Carmel Ventures and Tenaya Capital, the former venture capital arm of Lehman Brothers. This is the second Israeli startup to announce multi-million VC rounds today after 5min informed the public about its $7.5 million Series B round, and once again first reported by business news site Globes.

Kontera provides publishers with real-time semantic analysis
technology that can enhance content and other information to
dynamically link terms that most accurately represent and predict
user-intent and engagement. This is known as in-text advertising,
and you might recognize the double-underlined words on some sites that
make display ads pop up when you hover your mouse over them. Other
market players include Vibrant Media and Infolinks.

Personally, I find this type of contextual advertising annoying from
a reader perspective, and I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on any ads
launched by in-text advertisements, unless it was by accident. But I
keep hearing from publishers and advertisers who have implemented
campaigns using in-text advertising that it’s actually a highly
effective way of pay-per-click promotion, and you wouldn’t be the first
to tell they were skeptical at first but lauding the technology
afterwards.

With the fresh injection, the total amount of capital pumped into the company has now reached $32.8 million. The $10.3 million Series B round now dates back nearly two years.

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Image Licensing Network GumGum Grabs $2.6 Million And Is Growing Fast

Image licensing network GumGum has raised $2.6 million in and extended Series A funding round led by GRP Venture Partners with First Round Capital participating. This brings GumGum’s total funding to close to $4 million.

GumGum has been seeing fast growth since its launch
last year. Measured as an advertising network (but for images), GumGum
became a Quantcast Top 100 site, reaching 13.7 million people in the
U.S. and 23.5 million worldwide in February. Currently, GumGum reaches
29.8 million people in the U.S. and 50 million people worldwide,
according to Quantcast’s lastest stats. More than 2,000 Web publishers
license images through GumGum, which allows them to pay based on how
many people see the image or use them for free with embedded
advertising.

GumGum current clients include B5Media, gossip site DailyFill, Glam Media,
MTV, TMZ, New York Post and Gawker. Sites contract directly with photo
agencies, and GumGum keeps track of who is using what images and how
many times they are viewed. That is what those Quantcast numbers are
counting, thus GumGum acts like an ad network for images. GumGum’s
founder Ophir Tanz
says the new round of funding will be used to develop additional
solutions around image licensing as well as drive new revenue
opportunities to publishing partners.

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Quantcast Shakes Up Ad-Targeting Model

In 2006, it started out by offering a free service that allowed Web
publishers to track the types of people visiting their sites through
software code it placed on the sites.

The service put Quantcast in competition with Nielsen and comScore,
which track audiences based on the Web-surfing behaviors of panels of
Internet users, among other methods.

Now Quantcast plans to translate the technology it has installed on
more than 10 million Web sites into revenue. Its new media-buying
service, known as Quantcast Media Program, begins by allowing
advertisers to create a detailed profile of the types of people they
want to reach. Then Quantcast finds Web sites using its measurement
technology that are attracting those types of people. It takes a cut of
the revenue from the resulting ads sold by the Web sites.

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