Big news tonight from Seattle based wiki/social networks startup Wetpaint (we covered their growth spurt last week): they’ve raised a $25 million third round of financing, bringing the total amount of capital raised to nearly $40 million, and they’ve launched an embeddable wiki product called Wetpaint Injected.
The round of financing was led by DAG Ventures, with investors from previous rounds also participating.
Wetpaint Injected was internally called “Balco” - it is an embeddable version of a Wetpaint wysiwyg wiki for third parties. It isn’t a simple javascript or Flash embed. It’s a deeper integration that requires an insertion of code into a site’s back end application files. That allows the wiki to be created at the server level, not simply rendered in the user’s browser like most widgets. The idea is a pretty straightforward way to go about doing this, but has significant SEO benefits for the partner because the wiki content is embedded directly into the HTML of the website.
The product can be tailored to match a site’s look and feel, and can use an existing sign in system to avoid new account registration. Launch partners include Flixster, IGN, and Nuwire (IGN screen shot to right, see it here). The product is free for publishers to use for up to 100,000 impressions per month - over that and Wetpaint charges either a revenue share or CMP basis.
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they just launched this at 9pm, you are fast!
Interesting service.. and already 3rd round in a short period of time, impressive!
Smart of Ben to capitalize on the obvious appetite in the investment community!
what do they need $40 million for?? buying servers???
I imagine $40 million could help build out a sales team to sell their new product. (Just speculation from a competitor.)
Somehow I find it wrong for companies like this (and Ning) to raise big bucks on anything except for infrastructure.
These companies finally look for more aggressive monetizing than they should aim at. Or they look at dearer acquisition which also leads to the same from the new owner. In both cases the end users are those who suffer.
(another opinion from a competitior).
Nice one to raise the round in anticipation of the new product launch. I think their will be a lot of demand for it. Getting the software server side makes all the difference from a SEO perspective. I guess though it will be harder to get partners to commit the extra development time (thus the need to ramp up business development).
Congrats to Ben and company! Great to see another Seattle firm doing so well.
Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies
DAG Ventures. Good show, chaps. Throwing money at KP picks and hoping for the best is a fine strategy as far as investment strategies go. You take the risk, KP takes the gain. Cheerio!
Here’s a question: To what extent do these larger than necessary investments serve to stifle competition and in turn stunt options for us buyers/users? If the game becomes about who can raise the most — then the focus seems to be about optimizing for intimidation and market manipulation. It becomes about winning vs. being the best. And those aren’ t the same things.
Nice service, but for an offering touting SEO benefits they have a few improvements to make. To start, it would be nice to see unique titles for each of the pages (looks like the default is to have all pages with the same title).
For a system that really offers SEO benefits, MediaWiki still seems to be the best bet. The WYSIWYG editor and customizable templates certainly give it a good start, and if they improve the code structure and targeted SEO elements seems like a pretty solid offering.