Spot.IM socialising the Web
Spot.im is helping publishers solve a major problem that involves comment trolls. When commenters are anonymous, they tend to write extreme replies compared to when they use their real names. This is one of the biggest reasons why Spot.im founders CEO Nadav Shoval, COO Roee Goldberg, and Ishay Green launched the company.
And now Spot.im offers cloud-based community creation and moderation tools. These tools are used by clients such as Microsoft, Boston Globe, Hearst Group, Verizon Media Group, Refinery29, AOL, NBC, Refinery, Time, Fox News, and Huffington Post.
And recently, Spot.im announced that it raised $25 million in Series D funding led by Insight Venture Partners. WGI Group (founded by Noah Goodhart, Jonah Goodhart, and Michael Walrath), Norma Investments, Millhouse Capital, AltaIR Capital, Cerca, and Roman Abramovich also participated in this round. Including this funding round, Spot.im has raised $63 million.
“Our goal has always been to provide publishers with the ability to build a sustainable business organically through their content and community — not arbitrary clicks,” said CEO Shoval via VentureBeat. “We are excited by the enthusiasm of our investors and partners for the platform that we’re building. Together, we look forward to shaping a new era for the digital media industry that’s focused first and foremost on delivering the value and experience that readers deserve.”
Spot.im is also considered the largest community platform partner with over 80% of top-tier U.S. publishers that are now hitting 400 million unique monthly visitors. And Spot.im’s software-as-a-service solution can be implemented into a website with a few lines of code or integrated into a smartphone app with an SDK.
“Pressures of monetization have been poisonous to the digital media industry,” added newly appointed Spot.im president Itzik Ben-Bassat (former senior executive at Wix.com and Blizzard Entertainment) via VentureBeat. “It’s time that digital media companies begin looking beyond the low-hanging fruit of measuring growth by the sheer volume of clicks or impressions, and Spot.IM is the solution for just that.”
The embeddable comments feature offered by Spot.im has bubble awareness indicators that encourages live chats and supports rich media like photos, videos, and personalized feeds. Plus it has moderation tools that tap machine learning algorithms that automatically removes spam and offensive content.
And Spot.im’s product also highlights the most popular content that sites offer. And it monetizes ads within user-generated content and hosts community and product review pages.
For writers, Spot.im offers a social live blogging tool for reporters to publish real-time updates and layer posts from third-party apps like Slack.
“We have no plans of slowing down. This year will see us constantly innovating as we build the best community platform of the Open Web, redefining once again what community and engagement means on publishers’ sites. We’ll double our team, adding key roles to support our exponential growth. And we’ll expand our partnerships further, both throughout the US and reaching across the ocean into Europe — working with publishers to build the future of digital media. A future less reliant on cheap clicks, and centered more on sustainable connections, community, and value for everyone,” explained Shoval in a blog post. “Despite how far we’ve come, this is still just the beginning of a very exciting user-based revolution in digital media — and we are proud to be at the forefront of it. We will work tirelessly until the web is as it should be: open, content-driven, and community-based. As we use this new funding to revolutionize experiences for users and publishers, always on our minds will be the quest for this Open Web and with it, independent media, free speech, and democracy.”
