Toledo Tales

Subcomandante Bob just came across this hot bit of tech news, and he is running the press release verbatim:

The PayPerPost Revolution Accelerates, Sponsored Blogging Marketplace Secures $7 Million Series B

Draper Fisher Jurvetson leads round and joins Board of Directors

ORLANDO, FL – (June 12, 2007) – PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers and other consumer content creators, today announced it has completed a $7 million second round investment led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an investor in the company's Series A and one of the world’s leading high-technology venture capital firms. The financing brings the total amount of capital raised by PayPerPost to over $10 million, giving the company considerable resources for further development as the industry’s leading Consumer Generated Advertising marketplace. Additional participants in the round include existing investors Inflexion Partners and Village Ventures as well as new investor DFJ Gotham. With this investment, DFJ Managing Director Josh Stein also joins PayPerPost’s Board of Directors.

“PayPerPost created this exciting new advertising space and has established itself as the industry leader,” said Ted Murphy, chief executive officer of PayPerPost. “Although we’ve only used a portion of our first round capital, this added support from investors unlocks significant growth potential. Our content creator and advertiser ROI metrics clearly demonstrate the upside for PayPerPost’s model. We intend to use this capital to build the infrastructure, visibility and professional expertise necessary to reach and retain a greater network of advertisers and content creators than ever before.”

Since its founding in June of 2006, PayPerPost has signed more than 6,500 advertisers to its groundbreaking service, which has enabled Consumer Content Creators to be compensated for their efforts discussing specific companies, products or services via blogs, videos or other media. The content creators are required to disclose relationships with advertisers on their blog, providing transparency for the end reader. Over 125,000 Internet postings, most in the form of blogs, have already earned money for their creators through PayPerPost’s innovative marketplace. PayPerPost recently released PayPerPost Direct, a disruptive new service that allows advertisers to contract and negotiate directly with individual bloggers they identify through a safe, managed system.

“PayPerPost has laid a strong foundation for the future,” noted Tim Draper, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “It continues to attract a critical mass of participants from both the advertising and blogging communities. Analogous to Overture’s sponsored search model, we believe PayPerPost’s business model holds disruptive potential and will enable the company to thrive in the evolving paid-content arena.”

To mark the $7 million dollar funding, PayPerPost has launched a new website detailing the company’s service offering at http://www.payperpost.com. Bloggers and advertisers can easily sign up at the site and begin leveraging the self service marketplace.

This new investment capital means that investors are pleased with the first-year results of this startup, and that future growth is definitely in the offing for PayPerPost. Companies, as you know, generally do not receivenew funding unless their business model shows promising results.

PayPerPost definitely offers bloggers the most ways to earn money and connect with prospective advertisers. Their new program, PPP Direct, might just revolutionize the process, as advertisers can target specific websites that they believe will help them reach a desired demographic.

The support team at PPP rocks, and they blow away their competitors at other third-party ad firms. When Bob has had occasion to contact PPP, his questions have been answered in a timely fashion, and even when his messages have wound up in a queue, PPP at least provided an idea of where you are in the line.

PPP also does more to promote the blogs of its Posties than the other third-party ad firms. Bob's websites have benefited from the increased exposure and links, and the networking possibilities of being a Postie are an decided plus when considering whether or not to join the program.

If Bob had two nickels, he'd be investing in PayPerPost, that's for sure. As it is, though, Bob is quite happy to get paid to blog with PayPerPost. They rock!