ShopthisLook, making images “shoppable”
We recently announced a new product called ShopthisLook. It received great press coverage on TechCrunch and CNBC. Here is a live example of the product.
As you can see we are turning online images into points of commerce, effectively making them “shoppable.” We are very excited about this product because it not only provides a new revenue stream for publishers, but it also creates tremendous consumer value. We believe ShopThisLook is something users are going to look forward to seeing on images.
Our focus has always been to leverage our deep understanding of online content to solve problems. We believe ShopThisLook is a natural addition to our licensing product and we are excited to show you more over the next year. If you are an interested publisher please email sales [at] gumgum [dot] come
GumGum partners with Bauer-Griffin
As many of our publishers already know, we’ve partnered with leading celebrity photography agency Bauer-Griffin!
Here’s a quote from Frank Griffin, CEO of Bauer-Griffin:
“As print publications march towards potential demise it is important that IP holders position
themselves for the digital future,” said Frank Griffin, co-founder and CEO of Bauer-Griffin. “Content
licensing should model the performance-based nature of online advertising networks. GumGum has
designed a product that thoroughly tends to the needs of IP holders and online publishers. We are
excited to utilize GumGum’s technology to facilitate our transition online.”
Read the press full release here!
Bauer-Griffin Homepage
Bauer-Griffin Blog
Stay tuned for more partnership announcements!
GumGum partners w/Glam & Splash News
If I had one of the largest networks of online publishers I would offer my publishers value added services to keep them happy. Seems like a no brainer. Glam Media, the largest online network of female oriented sites, has done just that!
We are excited to announce a partnership between Glam, GumGum and Splash News.
Glam is providing their network of over 450 sites the ultimate value add, free and legal access to some of the best entertainment content in the world. Details below:
- Glam is marketing the partnership to their entire network of over 450 sites.
- Splash News is providing the entertainment content.
- The content will be ad-supported. See an example here.
- Publishers will receive a share of the advertising revenue.
- Publishers are not paying out of pocket.
- Publishers receive legal and open access to Splash News.
How is the above possible? Two companies, innovative in their respective fields, have realized the true value of content and decided to utilize GumGum’s analytics and monetization technology to get the job done.
We are excited to welcome Glam’s publishers!
GumGum has partnered with Newscom!
We are proud to announce that we have partnered with Newscom!
Newscom is a world leader in content aggregation. The partnership will give GumGum publishers access to millions upon millions of high-quality photographs from more than 100 of the world’s foremost content creators. This is a big leap forward in making the world’s best content accessible to publishers of all sizes. Beyond this, Newscom does a tremendous job of presenting publishers with a rich licensing experience.
Here are just some of the verticals covered by Newscom:
Celebrity World News Business and Finance Technology Science and Health Sports Politics Creative Content
See the press release!
Contact us now if you are interested in licensing Newscom content!
GumGum Press Release 7/31/2008 – Lots of Announcements!
GumGum Secures Series A Financing; Officially unveils revolutionary new licensing platform
Company releases non-flash based licensing platform, traction soars. Company raises Series A led by First Round Capital and Crosscut Ventures.
SANTA MONICA, CA – July 31, 2008 - GumGum, an analytics and monetization platform for content online, announced today that it has secured a Series A round of financing. First Round Capital and Crosscut Ventures will co-lead the round. Howard Morgan and Brian Garrett join the company’s board of directors.
The Series A funding will enable the company to build out Version 2 of its licensing product. No longer utilizing Flash technology, the new version is an enormous leap forward, providing full flexibility with content, improved monetization and no required changes in existing workflow between publishers and content providers
GumGum has experienced explosive growth with its new offering. Despite being in private beta for the last 60 days, GumGum is currently tracking over 300 million license views per month.
GumGum continues to validate its usage-based approach to content-licensing. GumGum adds MTV Europe as well as Gawker Media’s Gawker, Jezebel, Defamer, and io9 to its growing list of publishers. “GumGum reduces our photo licensing costs while still allowing us to publish high quality photographs from a variety of photo agencies,” said Nick Denton, Publisher of Gawker Media.
“GumGum has developed an innovative platform to connect content creators with publishers,” said Howard Morgan of First Round Capital. “While a fixed-fee content license might make sense for offline media, it makes no sense online. We feel confident that this team can grow a great business. The company has already signed several of the world’s largest photo agencies and is generating millions of content views per day.”
“GumGum is committed to solving the content licensing problem on the Internet. We have listened to our customers and are proud to announce this game-changing service,” said Ophir Tanz, CEO and co-founder of GumGum. “First Round Capital and Crosscut Ventures are absolutely top-notch. We are thrilled with their involvement and look forward to working with them as we continue to grow the company.”
# # #
About GumGum
GumGum represents a new business model for content licensing online. We use perfect information to facilitate a fair transaction between publishers and content providers. The result is a system that leverages usage-based licensing models to enhance monetization, increase access to content and much more!
GumGum was founded by Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir in 2006. The site publicly launched in November 2007 and currently tracks over 300 million license views per month. David Sacks (former COO of PayPal and current CEO of Geni.com) and Michael Jones (President of Userplane/SVP at AOL) sit on the company’s advisory board. The company previously raised $225k in angel funding.
About First Round Capital
First Round Capital is an early stage venture capital firm managed by Josh Kopelman, founder of Half.com and Howard Morgan, a founder of Idealab. First Round Capital provides seed-stage investment for innovative technology companies, often providing a company’s first outside capital. As former entrepreneurs, the principals understand the challenges of launching a new enterprise and look to take an active role in portfolio companies.
About Crosscut Ventures
Crosscut Ventures is a Los Angeles-based seed-stage venture capital firm founded by Rick Smith and Brian Garrett. Crosscut brings a depth of experience and an extensive network of relationships to help a company through its earliest phases of growth. Crosscut is looking for seed-stage opportunities in digital media, which includes online advertising, mobile, gaming, consumer internet and next generation infrastructure and analytics. Above all else, we are looking for great entrepreneurs who understand what it takes to win and who are looking for a financial partner committed to building world-class companies.
GumGum’s 2nd Flavor
We have been very busy. I won’t try to recap everything in a single post, but I would like to talk about one of the more important developments.
GumGum has a new flavor and it is delicious!
Why does it taste so good?
- GumGum V1 used Flash technology to display content. With GumGum V2 there is no more Flash!
- Publishers can edit, resize, crop or mash-up licensed content with full flexibility.
- If GumGum’s servers go down, readers are not affected, the content still displays.
- No Flash, content displays without a delay.
- Content providers can maintain their sales relationships with publishers.
- Content providers can leverage their strong brands and user experience.
- Publishers receive the full SEO value of licensed content.
Publishers and content providers can now leverage GumGum’s innovative usage based licensing models with ZERO change in their existing workflow!
P.S. We are no longer promoting or making available the first version of GumGum; however, all previously created licenses will be supported. If you have been using GumGum please contact us and we will set you up on the new version.
EconCeleb
We are excited to announce we have sponsored EconCeleb. The event is hosted by paidContent and details are below. It is great to see top media executives realizing the value of celebrity content!
July 23rd @The Hollywood Roosevelt [buy tickets]
“Celebrity is a booming marketplace and all of this just adds up to good business for an array of old media and new media entrepreneurs. What drives the economics of celebrity content, supply or demand? What are the challenges of monetizing it? Who is creating, producing, and distributing the content? Where are investors seeing opportunities in this new mass and who is capturing the most buzzworthy M&A opportunities to be the biggest and best in the space.” –paidContent.org
Look under your table and you’re sure to find some GumGum
GumGum is 1 of 32 companies selected to present at Dealmaker Media’s “Under the Radar Conference!” [official announcement]
We’re thrilled to have been selected (list of previous presenters). The focus of the conference is “Social media and entertainment.” The judges include some of our favorite peers – Robert Scoble, Kara Swisher and Dave McClure.
The event takes place June 3rd, 2008.
GumGum is Very Sticky
Jason Calacanis, one of my favorite entrepreneurs, believes an effective metric for judging the health of a startup is to gauge the volume of search traffic resulting from the company’s name. Why? A photographer may be at lunch with a peer and say, “Hey have you checked out GumGum? It’s really cool!” When the friend gets back to a computer, they will mostly likely Google “GumGum.” If your company name is generating more organic traffic over time, then you are doing something right.
It amazes me everyday how much traffic we receive from the keyword “GumGum.” It means we are, or better yet, our partners, you guys, are doing something right!
On a similar note, we are the #5 search listing on Google for “photo licensing.” This is amazing. We have been live for less than 60 days and we are ranking better than Getty and Corbis. Keep chewing GumGum!
P.S. Google indexes frequently. Our ranking may change by the time you read this post. :)
GumGum’s New Wrapper
GumGum photos to date have been served via standard OBJECT and EMBED HTML tags. No longer. We are now serving GumGum photos via JavaScript. J.S. provides increased flexibility and compatibility. If for whatever reason you do not want to use our new J.S. embed, the old embed is available as well.
We are also excited to announce the GumGum Footer. Below every photo, an HTML footer will display a link pointing to the content owner’s website. Why is this important? It provides the copyright owner with tremendous SEO value!
