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WidgetBucks Reels in 10 Million Bucks

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Jun 12, 2008 

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Kathleen  |

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WidgetBucks Reels in 10 Million Bucks

ADOTAS – The aptly named WidgetBucks just secured $10 million in funding for its online advertising network of retail and shopping widgets. The second round was led by VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and joined by Ignition Partners, which supplied WidgetBucks with their first set of Benjamins.

WidgetBucks said the new round will enable it to develop three strategic areas: technology to further optimize publisher earnings, global expansion to diversify publisher revenue and team development to grow its engineering, sales and interactive marketing efforts.

WidgetBucks was founded in 2005. In May of this year, 100 million unique visitors saw its ad widget served across sites and blogs of more than 20,000 publishers. It ranked no. 2 among niche ad networks and even made it into the top 30 ad networks, according to comScore.

“We are thrilled to welcome Draper Fisher Jurvetson alongside our original partner, Ignition Partners, to the WidgetBucks family,” said Matt Hulett, CEO and chairman of Mpire and WidgetBucks (Mpire is WidgetBucks’ parent company). “Today, WidgetBucks is a contextual shopping-focused ad network that has truly taken off in terms of impressions and publisher adoption. Tomorrow, through this new investment and investment partner, our vision as an ad network dramatically broadens to include virtually any type of monetization model that self-tunes and optimizes yield for our publishers.”

Widget investments are the new hotness, with RockYou recently snagging $35 million, Clearspring bringing in $18 million and Sprout scooping up $5 million.

Tags: comScore, finance, funding, interactive-advertising, Mpire, online-advertising-networks and widgetbucks

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