MojoPages, a local listings search engine, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Austin Ventures. MojoPages’s search technology powers local business listing search engines for local newspapers, and TV and radio stations.
Originally a stand alone search engine for business listings, the company found that it could not compete with bigger players like Citysearch and Yelp. So Jon Carder, CEO of MojoPages, decided to overhaul the site’s business model and offer white label, branded local search engine technology to media companies. The site’s listings are similar to Yelp in that they offer user reviews and ratings of businesses. To date, MojoPages has contracted with more than 1,000 media sites to create branded local business search engines.
Carder says MojoPages will use the funds to expand the capabilities of its Yelp-like search engine, so that the search engine will become an aggregator of listings and reviews. The site hopes to pull local info from sites like Yelp, CitySearch, and YellowPages into one engine.
deadpool all the way
One thing that would be cool is to see a yellow pages style website where all the listing are free (spidering all the entries basically) but allows people to post reviews, i mean the traditional YP can’t do that because they charge for advertising but seems lie that would be something for the web, kind of an angie’s list but local and in YP format
@jimjerky I disagree… they just need to expand outside of the business niche
the innovation and vision is overwhelming.
Like…SUPER deadpool.
This is nothing to celebrate about. VCs are unbelievably stupid (at least Austin Ventures is) if this is the kind of investment they choose after flipping thru business plans all day.
Raising money != making money no matter how much entrepreneurs believe that VCs investing in their company may validate the business idea.
SUPER DUPER deadpool
FAST has been dominating this space for years. i see no reason for Mojopages to do better.
I’d probably say deadpool too if I didn’t know how the company was doing. Jon Carder, founder of MojoPages here. The reason Austin invested is because we have real revenues and real traffic and it’s growing.. well.. like a hockey stick. Austin doesn’t just throw cash around, they follow real business models that have a strong potential to hit cash flow break even (especially in this economy).
jimjerky – the difference between us and FAST is that we offer more than just a search; we offer an entire social local search website with a community behind it. It’s completely plug and play for the media companies to get into the local search space. The TV, newspaper and radio partners receive traffic from their own promotions of the directory, from existing traffic to their website and from search engines. They actually generate fairly good traffic and real revenue, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get 1000 sites in such a short time.
We’re not the coolest thing since sliced bread but we do offer a good solution for media companies and should have a pretty good business if we stay focused on our niche.
Jon, where can I find more information about your white label product?
Sam, contact Lee@MojoPages.com (biz dev). Thanks for your interest.
I think it was smart to recognize the problem in your business model and correct it. This takes guts…
It does take guts, but that’s also the nature of a Startup.. and also the beauty of one, you can maneuver quickly if things aren’t working
John and Cliff, couldn’t agree more. Fail fast, keep burn low, know what the competition is not doing well, surround yourself with the best people, never give up and with a little luck you’ll find the right model.
The team at MojoPages is on track and creating innovative offerings that add value to their target market. I was involved in the initial vision and execution of what they are doing and it is spot on in so many ways.
Congrats to the Mojo Team
No disrespect. I mean every entrepreneur dream in web is to feel some sense of recognition that VCs would want to invest in their start up.
But having looked at this site. I do not get the sense that much effort was placed in the design. The thumbnail pictures look rather cheap and the layout is very bad.
Of course I could be wrong. None the less congrats on securing funding.
Local search is important.
Just go to AAfter search, and search for ‘best buy’ , and click on the yellow page link. Lowest number of clicks, and search text to any local store info.
Good luck to Austin ventures and Mojopages….
According to quantcast, they have 42K uniques versus Yelp, MerchantCircle, Citysearch who are all above 5M on quantcast and 15M in reality.
Where is the traffic showing up ?
http://www.quan...m/mojopages.com
BTS – The media partners get the traffic not MojoPages.com as the directory resides on their URL.
Anti Matter, I tend to agree with you. The site has room for improvement. Check back in September with our new release. It’s going to be faster, more relevant, improvements to design, UI etc. Thanks for the congrats.
Congrats on funding. Looking forward to your new release.
I’m pretty sure that the CEO–or, as he prefers to be called, Chief Mojo–is Jon Carder. We used to do business together and he’s a really nice guy. Think you could make the quick correction for him?
Best of luck to MojoPages with their new direction!
Congrats to the Mojo team over there in Solana Beach. Excited to see where you guys take it.
I’m sure this will be very popular with the geo domainers. Congrats to the team at Mojo, it’s about time that we have a white label local search engine.
Congrats to Jon and the team!
Hey Leena, you guys might want to correct the article, it’s Carder, not Gardner.
@joncarder – where’s the plug for your loving design team
What I want is a yelp-like listing service with a searchable catalog. So I want to be able to type in “Canon 5D Mark II” into the search engine, and get a map with every store around me that has this item in stock and the price for each store. And even a way for the stores to compete against each other and price match.
We are currently working on this. First, we partnered with Citysearch to showcase the scale of our technology across 15 million venues. You can enter a keyword and see a location context to the keyword of a venue. Next, we will be offering product search with a location context also. As for mojopages, I wish them the best and congrats on the new funding. Welcome to the local search scene! I actually like the biz model. We are also taking a similar approach, where we license a visual search engine to customers. For more info, visit http://www.geopage.com.
Congrats on the $5M
Don’t sweat the haters. It’s a very impressive accomplishment.
Now make the best of it.
Are you guys based in Austin?
nope, San Diego
Congratulations on raising the funding!
Local search and listing is a huge space right now with a lot of opportunity and action. Retail is a $2 trillion dollar business with less than 5% of that spent online. That leave a huge under-served market out there.
Look at what Google is doing in local and the recent statements and acquisitions by AOL. Austin Ventures knows what they are doing and they have a good track record – see their recent SolarWinds IPO and the analyst reviews and stock upgrade just this week.
The local search and listing space is growing with aggregators like MojoPages, listing sites like Angie’s List, and review sites with the obvious being Yelp!. There are new sites coming out as well to serve the local business community with simple self-serve platforms.
We just launched http://www.wantANDfound.com – a local justin-in-time marketing platform for businesses including retail, restaurants and spas.
There is a lot of action in this space with some exciting new companies coming out.
Congrats to the team at MojoPages as the white-label product is a viable and needed solution for the market being targeted. I’ve watched their development for 2-3 years now and each iteration is better than the last. Agree with the SD – don’t sweat the haters.
How do you plan to catch up to Yelp? What differentiates you from Yelp? How will you compete with their large community manager and salesforce?
The difference between MojoPages and Yelp is similar to the way Hulu or Youtube is different from white label video solutions like Brightcove and Magnify.net. Yelp is a destination site, where as MojoPages powers local search for media websites.
Also, does anyone know about the allegations about Mr. Carder from numerous posts on this comment board? http://forum.ab...ead.php?t=63773
As you read the entire message board you’ll see that everyone was paid in full, which is verifiable by Commission Junction.
Also, does anyone know about the allegations about Mr. Carder from numerous posts on this comment board? http://forum.ab...ead.php?t=63773
So Mojopages like Joost is turning to a white label solution shortly before the deadpool.
I am normally kind to start-ups, but Mojo´s business model is totally flawed. The market for white label business listing platforms is overcrowded.
I’d like to see this is in the video blogs that MojoPages did at first (30 days to launch). I know they were too expensive to keep doing, but seeing how a company handles going from the high of starting up to changing their model after time would be interesting.
the innovation and vision is overwhelming.
Congrats to Jon and the team
I have used a few of the review sites and enjoyed mojopages most. I haven’t used it much this year because I have reviewed just about everything I can already. I also own a business and encourage customers to give me a review, as many biz owners do. I used to push mojopages but now worry that my customer’s reviews serve my biz better on sites with higher rankings in search results for the biz. I check what potential customers see by doing searches for my biz or type of biz. Mojopages was in the search results a couple of years ago but that started changing. Right before mojo disappeared completely from the results, I saw a disappointing trend. When I saw a mojopages result in the search and clicked on it, I was redirected to the front page where login starts instead of to the actual page that the content is on. Other times, the url was changed or not good anymore. I wondered what was going on with the urls and got a sinking feeling in my stomach thinking google will punish them for whatever it is that they have done with the links or urls. I am sad to say that mojo content is no longer in any search result from any search engine that I check. The last straw was when I realized I couldn’t even inform customers to see my reviews by directly typing in the biz name at mojopages.com. I tried it and that was screwed up too. If they figure out the problems and fix it, I will resume sending reviewers thier way. Otherwise, I have to send reviewers to sites that will benefit ME, meaning sites where potential customers will see the reviews for my business.
I hope Jon uses some of that money to make mojopages speed up because it is sooo slow. Mojopages is a lot of fun but I often got frustrated with the slowness and gave up. Sometimes the speed is adequate but more often not.
John Gsoell is a creep for bringing up something that happened so long ago. Many successful business owners have a failed at something previously. We live and learn, and find what we like and what fits us best. I don’t know anybody that is still working at the first job they ever got.