GumGum raises $1.2 million series A
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Image analytics company GumGum has raised $1.2 million in series A from First Round Capital and Crosscut ventures. Howard Morgan and Brian Garrett will join the companies board of directors.
GumGum is a licensing and distribution platform for online content. It tries to give publishers a better deal for their online content e.g. images. Unlike the offline media model where flat rate is used to license content, GumGum tracks online distribution of published content to provide more return to content creators.
For offliine, the flat rate model works because distribution is finite. Online, thanks to Google and other search engines, a story lives forever. We have developed two usage models to fairly monetize a license:
- Pay-per-use allows publishers to license content on a CPM basis.
- Ad-supported subsidizes the licensing revenue through advertisements, providing the publishers with free content.
Ophir Tanz, chief executive of GumGum, said that the company has tested the technology in the past 60 days and has had some astounding results. More than 300 million views of licensed photos have been tracked each month. GumGum has added MTV Europe, Gawker Media’s Gawker, Jezebel, Defamer and io9 to it’s publisher network.
The money will be used by GumGum to move to a non Flash based technology for tracking online image distribution on the internet.
