Brian Garret, Ari Mir, Ophir Tanz, Mark Suster

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our amazing content and publishing partners. We exist to serve you. We’ve got BIG plans moving forward so stay tuned!

Welcome Mark Suster and the entire GRP team.

See the Techcrunch article on our raise.

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 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.”

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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.

The online world is different from the offline world. Value is calculated differently, rules are enforced differently. When an industry attempts to apply a decades-old business model to the Internet, without accounting for the very real ways in which the Internet is different, the results are generally disastrous. For brevity’s sake we’ll avoid going into the multitude of examples where this is currently playing out. Suffice it to say there is no shortage of reasons for why this happens: Underestimating the value proposition and/or threat the Internet represents, fear of change, eventual acceptance of change without knowing how to change, bureaucracy, absence of the right technology, panic.

GumGum is focused on content licensing. More specifically, GumGum solves the very real problem of how content is licensed for the Internet. Offline, content is licensed for a finite period of time to a predictable audience. These parameters enable content-owners and publishers to come up with reasonably good pricing arrangements. On the Internet, however, content lives forever and usage is unknown. And herein lies the problem: How do you fairly price a license when circulation is unknowable?

Let’s look at an example: Say you do a Google search for “Keira Knightley, Atonement Premier” today. You will land on a blog or news page with images of Keira Knightley and the publisher will have monetized your page view. Now, fast forward 5 years into the future and perform the same search. You will end up at a post with the same images and guess what? The publisher is STILL generating ad revenue from EVERY page view he or she receives. So what is happening here? Publishers are paying a flat-rate-fee for photographs and then using the media to monetize their web properties indefinitely. This is a raw deal for content-owners.

It is the recognition of this glaring market inefficiency that led us to create GumGum.

GumGum’s solution is to bill publishers on a per-use basis. This means every time a piece of content licensed through GumGum is viewed, that view is monetized. We have built technology to safely distribute, track and monetize consumption of media online. This enables publishers to absorb costs alongside revenue, thereby eliminating the capital-intensive barriers to entry. This also puts control back into the hands of content-owners where it belongs.

GumGum offers two monetization models: Pay-Per-Use and Ad Overlay. With Pay-Per-Use content owners set a CPM and publishers can license unadulterated media. The second monetization option is Ad-Overlay in which we display a non-invasive [video] ad on top of media and monetize content that way – publishers can license media free with this option. With either model content-owners realize the full value of their content over time.

I recently read a quote in a Forbes article taken from a large publisher’s conference that made me smirk: “I don’t know what to do, but I am ready to do it” the speaker said in talking about how newspapers should handle online publishing. This statement, to me, so succinctly represents the general feeling of industries at large, and, more relevant to GumGum, photographers, videographers and content-creators/owners in general in adapting to the Internet. Well, we believe we are the answer content-owners don’t yet know they have.

There are so many benefits, but we’d rather let the product speak for itself.

We look forward to hearing from you!