{"id":337990,"date":"2017-04-11T07:10:12","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T23:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1474629"},"modified":"2017-04-11T07:10:12","modified_gmt":"2017-04-10T23:10:12","slug":"popular-pays-raises-3-1m-in-new-funding-to-connect-marketers-and-creators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/popular-pays-raises-3-1m-in-new-funding-to-connect-marketers-and-creators\/","title":{"rendered":"Popular Pays raises $3.1M in new funding to connect marketers and creators"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

How can Popular Pays<\/a> stand out in the influencer marketing crowd<\/a>? The key, according to co-founder Corbett Drummey, is to focus on content.<\/p>\n

The approach seems to have convinced investors, with Popular Pays announcing that it has raised an additional $3.1 million, which it rolled up with the $2 million it raised after participating in Y Combinator<\/a> into a $5.2 million Series A. The round was led by GoAhead VC with participation from Pallasite Ventures and Hyde Park Angels.<\/p>\n

Drummey told me that when he started Popular Pays, he assumed that the main value\u00a0the service could provide was connecting marketers\u00a0with social media influencers to\u00a0promote their brands and products. That wasn\u2019t entirely wrong, but he said, \u201cThe real value of what we\u2019re doing is in the content itself. Brands realized that, too \u2014 they wanted the impressions, but they were staying for the content.\u201d<\/p>\n

After all, brands need an increasing amount of videos, photos and blog posts\u00a0if they\u2019re going to keep posting and engaging online, a trend that\u2019s only going to increase as social media shifts toward more Snapchat Stories-style formats.<\/p>\n

To be clear, Popular Pays hasn\u2019t abandoned the influencer marketing model entirely. Drummey said most of the company\u2019s campaigns involve a combination of generating content for a brand and publishing promotional messages on users\u2019 accounts.<\/p>\n

However, he said the company has switched from calling those users influencers \u2014 instead, it calls them creators, to reflect the fact that for many of them, \u201cTheir value isn\u2019t necessarily that they\u2019re famous or a celebrity, but that they\u2019re professional content creators.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drummey also noted that Popular Pays offers tools that help marketers manage many creators at once (hundreds, in the case of some campaigns), and to A\/B test the content that they produce. And the company is expanding the way it makes money by licensing the technology to other businesses and also working with resellers \u2014 in fact, he said resellers already account for nearly one-third of the company\u2019s revenue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Popular How can Popular Pays stand out in the influencer marketing crowd? The key, according to co-founder Corbett Drummey, is to focus on content. The approach seems to have convinced investors, with Popular Pays announcing that it has raised an additional $3.1 million, which it rolled up with the $2 million it raised after participating in Y Combinator into a $5.2 million Series A. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-337990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}