You know those “CAPTCHAs” you run into from time to time during your Web surfing sessions and Internet escapades? Well, a startup named Solve Media has developed a way to upgrade and monetize those pesky CAPTCHAs and, as my colleague Anthony Ha recently detailed, is beginning to see real results.
In fact, TechCrunch has learned today that Solve Media this week closed a $6 million round of series B financing, led by New Atlantic Ventures, with contributions from First Round Capital, AOL Ventures, BullPen Capital and others. The new round, which co-founder and CEO Ari Jacoby says the company will use to expand its sales and engineering teams so that it can continue working on new ways to provide ant-bot security solutions to publishers, brings the startup’s total investment to $15 million.
But for those unfamiliar, CAPTCHAs are those security mechanisms one finds when taking actions across the Web that require us to input a random set of letters and numbers so that, say Ticket Master knows that a human being is buying tickets and not some bot or evil supercomputer. Founded back in 2009, Solve Media has been on a mission to re-imagine CAPTCHAs, allowing advertisers running “Type-In” CAPTCHAs to show display ads, video ads or prompt users to type in a brand name or message instead of just serving users with those fuzzy alphanumeric puzzles.
The idea behind Solve Media’s CAPTCHA alternative is to enable publishers to see supplementary revenue from the impressions and clicks taken from these ads and messages, while giving advertisers a new way to get their messages in front of consumers and use similar ads to run as a pre-roll before their videos. In fact, it’s a method that Solve Media co-founder and CEO Ari Jacoby claims deliver 10x higher brand recall than standard display ads.
As Anthony described last month, Solve saw over 1 billion engagements with its Type-In ads last year and expects to exceed that number in the second quarter of this year alone, expecting to hit 4 billion for the year total. As a result, the company is on track to see $13 to $16 million in revenue this year.
Jacoby also tells us that the startup is now adding “hundreds of publishers each month” and is working with over 100 major brands, like Unilever and InterContinental Hotels Group, attracted by Solve’s claims that its average click-through rate is now over 1 percent.
The new capital follows the launch of the startup’s mobile platform this week, in which it’s working with early partners like Unilever and Songza to offer alternative ways for publishers to monetize using ads (including) video on their mobile pages. “In mobile, we use our devices in a very purposeful manner,” Jacoby tells us. “Most mobile advertising stinks because it competes with the content you want to view and is easily (and accidentally) clicked on, which detracts from the value both for consumers and advertisers alike.”
The Solve Media CEO believes that, if consumers are going to have to grit their teeth and bear mobile advertising and security mechanisms like CAPTCHA, why not offer a system that allows them to unlock the mobile content they want to view in exchange for ad engagement. Admittedly, as a user, it seems like it has the potential to add friction to the mobile viewing experience, but at least it’s a more direct way of advertising than the sneaky, surreptitious display shenanigans that still pervade the mobile Web today.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/zBm8Z82ekGg/
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