I’ve mentioned before that I feel that PayPerPost is one of the best methods a blogger can use to generate revenue through their site, and I’ve just gotten word that the folks at PPP just pulled in another whoppin’ chunk of capital to keep things moving along.

For those who scoff at paid blogging, let me say this; Revenue from PayPerPost has allowed me to upgrade my server architecture and is singlehandedly paying for all of my hosting and bandwidth charges. Yes they pay people to advertise on blogs. I feel that this can be a very good thing. It keeps good bloggers working harder to bring YOU, the reader quality stuff to fill your gray matter.

I also feel strongly that as long as the “Posties” monitor what they’re willing to write about that the model will continue to work, and if not, people will just stop reading blogs that are set up simply for the sake of advertising. I’ve personally turned down hundreds of dollars worth of opportunities that just don’t fit either of the blogs I’m approved for, and i’ll continue to do so if i can’t see a benefit for my readers. (Yes, I see this as a benefit. Go sign up and make a buck or two yourself!)

The press release follows, with some of my thoughts afterward:

Press Release:

The PayPerPost Revolution Accelerates, Sponsored
Blogging Marketplace Secures $7 Million Series B

Draper Fisher Jurvetson leads round and joins Board of Directors

ORLANDO, FL – (June 12, 2007) – PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers and other consumer content creators, today announced it has completed a $7 million second round investment led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an investor in the company’s Series A and one of the world’s leading high-technology venture capital firms. The financing brings the total amount of capital raised by PayPerPost to over $10 million, giving the company considerable resources for further development as the industry’s leading Consumer Generated Advertising marketplace. Additional participants in the round include existing investors Inflexion Partners and Village Ventures as well as new investor DFJ Gotham. With this investment, DFJ Managing Director Josh Stein also joins PayPerPost’s Board of Directors.

“PayPerPost created this exciting new advertising space and has established itself as the industry leader,” said Ted Murphy, chief executive officer of PayPerPost. “Although we’ve only used a portion of our first round capital, this added support from investors unlocks significant growth potential. Our content creator and advertiser ROI metrics clearly demonstrate the upside for PayPerPost’s model. We intend to use this capital to build the infrastructure, visibility and professional expertise necessary to reach and retain a greater network of advertisers and content creators than ever before.”

Since its founding in June of 2006, PayPerPost has signed more than 6,500 advertisers to its groundbreaking service, which has enabled Consumer Content Creators to be compensated for their efforts discussing specific companies, products or services via blogs, videos or other media. The content creators are required to disclose relationships with advertisers on their blog, providing transparency for the end reader. Over 125,000 Internet postings, most in the form of blogs, have already earned money for their creators through PayPerPost’s innovative marketplace. PayPerPost recently released PayPerPost Direct, a disruptive new service that allows advertisers to contract and negotiate directly with individual bloggers they identify through a safe, managed system.

“PayPerPost has laid a strong foundation for the future,” noted Tim Draper, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “It continues to attract a critical mass of participants from both the advertising and blogging communities. Analogous to Overture’s sponsored search model, we believe PayPerPost’s business model holds disruptive potential and will enable the company to thrive in the evolving paid-content arena.”

To mark the $7 million dollar funding, PayPerPost has launched a new website detailing the company’s service offering at http://www.payperpost.com. Bloggers and advertisers can easily sign up at the site and begin leveraging the self service marketplace.

My Thoughts:

I’m sure you’ve all figured out that this is a paid installment by now, but one of the reasons I took it was because the folks at PPP wanted me to add my thoughts on what they should do with all this extra cash. Aside from sending me a big chunk of it just because I’m such a nice guy, I think there are some changes that they can easily afford to make at this point.

  • Give your staff a raise! They’re doing a great job.
  • Revamp the blogger interface, it’s clunky and entirely too slow at times. If this means adding hardware or memory, hey, $7M can buy a lot of server power.
  • Add individual RSS feeds for available opportunities, or add that functionality to their toolbar, so that we don’t have to go log in to the site 5 or 6 times a day. I watch my RSS reader like a hawk, but I don’t go through my bookmarks often. A simple “ding!” with a little flyout window on my firefox toolbar would be a very good thing.
  • Go after new advertisers! Not every postie runs a product review blog. Give us more variety of opportunities to choose from. I run a food blog and a writing blog, how ’bout seeing if Kitchenaid or Overstock wants to get in on the game. perhaps Barnes&Noble would be interested in a blog buzz campaign,or individual authors. There are thousands of niche blogs out there, and our audiences are loyal.

OK Kiddies, there you have it. It’s a great day for PayPerPost and I don’t think the capital could have gone to a better outfit. The people are genuinely supportive and I’ve never had issue one with them, not something I can say about all the outfits out there.