On May 5th I got an interesting email. One of our competitors, Driving Revenue had bumped into us talking to a potential customer. Maybe we should chat?

We met for dinner in Chicago. We liked each other. Our companies had very complementary strengths. One thing led to another.

On Friday we signed the last of the paperwork to acquire the company. Driving Revenue was the first to do automated affiliate marketing and was completely bootstrapped to profitability by the founders Raymond Lyle and Jack Bafia. They boast a great customer list, a ton of depth in affiliate marketing and have built out a great team to support them.

We’re very excited to be joining forces. Ray is going to lead the sales and merchant relationship team and run our Chicago office. Jack will be moving to San Francisco to assume leadership of the product team. Everyone else is keeping their job as well.  They’ve all made a big bet on the future of the combined business. They are doubling down, not cashing out.

What does this mean for our customers? It means more scale, more merchant coverage and better rates. It means more resources to devote to engineering great new products and more people to devote to getting the word out and talking to our customers.

As part of this deal, our key investors Google Ventures and First Round Capital both more than doubled their investment in the company. We feel great about their continued support. We couldn’t ask for a more helpful, supported and connected board.

So as I said, it’s a very exciting day for VigLink. To our team, customers and investors – onwards and upwards. To the Driving Revenue family – welcome aboard!

Oliver Roup

CEO / co-founder, VigLink

More information can be found on our press page.

There’s been some noise in the blogosphere over the discovery that Posterous had installed VigLink and was utilizing it to monetize the latent commercial traffic on their platform. We’ve avoided commenting until our customer decided what they wanted to do in order to avoid interfering in what is no doubt a sensitive matter for them.

VigLink leaves decisions around disclosure up to our customers. Our terms of service require publishers to comply with all applicable local regulations but as these are still new and evolving, we leave it to our customer to judge what is most appropriate for their specific communities and their local legal jurisdiction.

In the coming weeks we will be working to make it easier for publishers to disclose the use of VigLink through branded badges a publisher may add to their site, linking to a clear explanation of what we do and offering the ability for a permanent customer opt-out. However, the ultimate decisions on how best to disclose will remain in the hands of our customers.

A few points of technical clarification:

• We and our competitors do not affect the PageRank of a page. We have received assurances from Google that this is so (we are backed by Google Ventures) and Danny Sullivan has written that he’s received the same guidance from Google. Our publishers who watch these things closely report no change in PageRank as a result of using our code.
• Posterous was not overwriting any existing affiliate links. Neither are 99% of our customers. The option is available for customers who would like it (those who run forums prohibiting commercial links for example) but very few have done so.
• We work hard not to “break the web” – we don’t use redirects, ad blockers work as intended and even if our servers are unreachable the page continues to behave as expected. We’ve gotten reports that middle clicks under some circumstances were mis-behaving and so we’ve disabled all modified click rewriting until we get this issue sorted out.
• We also work closely with merchants and affiliate networks to ensure we are meeting the requirements of their programs. Some merchants have “blacklists” or “whitelists” and we only affiliate links from publishers that those merchants find acceptable.
• Any link can be marked “not rewriteable” by adding the attribute rel=”norewrite” to the anchor tag. We will add a global tag that allows a page author to easily opt the whole page out of being rewritten.
• Offering the ability for our customers to share the revenue with their customers is something we are investigating. There are numerous technical and business challenges involved but we hope to be able to offer this ability where appropriate in the future.

VigLink believes that sites that facilitate commercial activity are contributing to the ecosystem and unobtrusively deriving revenue from that activity is entirely appropriate. We recognize that community expectations about what is acceptable will vary widely and we think decisions about what’s most appropriate in a given context are best left to our customers. We are working to provide even more tools for all our customers meet the expectations of their community.

If you have comments or concerns about VigLink, you can contact us at feedback@viglink.com or me personally at oroup@viglink.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Oliver Roup

Co-founder / CEO, VigLink