Lotame gets big funding from Battery Ventures

Lotame closed a multi-million dollar series A deal led by Battery Ventures. Lotame is a social media aggregator that focuses exclusively on helping advertisers and publishers monetize the ad space/inventory available on social networks. Lotame keeps the consumer interests at heart as well. A statement from the press release gives a better summary:

Lotame is a company that focuses on providing the most advanced revenue solutions exclusively within social media. It aggregates intelligence across multiple social networking sites, which allows advertisers to build the most targeted and customizable audiences, and gives publishers the ability to monetize their inventory more effectively to garner higher streams of revenue.

Lotame is challenging the status quo online advertising networks (ironic, we use to say that about Madison Ave when referring to online advertising networks). This is very similar in concept to Facebook’s Beacon that serves advertising based on consumer interests and privacy tolerance. The key difference from Beacon is Lotame is not restricted to the Facebook community, rather it uses a cutting edge crowd-control technology to gather trends, interests and likes among numerous disparate social networks and utilizes the data to benefit the three stakeholders: Advertisers, Publishers and Consumers.

This could be a win-win if Lorame’s technology can place relevant audiences around user-generated content, you get the new triple play– advertisers (target the audience), Publishers (monetizing the audience) and consumers (willingly participate as the audience).

Satya Patel from Battery Ventures has some great statistics about the brand stickiness of social media and user-generated content for further discussion.

This space is gaining tremendous momentum in 2008 as discussed in previous posts.