Google Ventures Invests in Affiliate Links Manager VigLink

Affiliate programs run by e-commerce sites, or any other site which derives sales from incoming link, are becoming increasingly widespread. But publishers can't practically keep up with all of them and implement them on their sites, which is where VigLink comes in. The startup sets itself as a middle man between the publishers and the online retailers, offering an easy way for the bloggers and other sites to get the affiliate fees they might be entitled to, but would have missed out on. Now, the company is announcing its latest round of funding in which it raised $800,000 from a number high-profile venture capital firms and investors.

"VigLink today announced that it has closed a seed investment from First Round Capital, Google Ventures, and individual investors including LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, longtime Google executive and current LinkedIn VP of Product Deep Nishar, and noted technology entrepreneurs Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler. The financing, which was co-led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures, will be used to accelerate VigLink's market expansion," the company announced (PDF - view in Google Docs).

The round actually dates from last summer, but it was only disclosed by the company now as it gets closer to leave the private beta period. The funding is important as it's just the fifth publicly disclosed investment from Google's venture arm which has been set up to look for opportunities that don't fall into the company's growing list of main interests.

This time though, VigLink operates very close to Google's main market, advertising, and though it's not a direct competitor for AdSense, they share quite a few attributes technologically and as a business. Users of the VigLink service have to embed a small piece of JavaScript code on their site, which enables it to keep track of outgoing links. The site is automatically enrolled in all the affiliate programs VigLink supports and the service handles all the dealings with the paying sites. VigLink, in return, takes a percentage of the revenue generated by the affiliate links.