In the big new world of business intelligence, RJMetrics has found a market helping ecommerce companies easily analyze operations data and make smarter decisions as a result. Big startups have signed on, including Fab, Bonobos, Threadless and thousands of smaller businesses. Today, the momentum has landed the Philadelphia enterprise startup a $6.5 million first venture round led by Trinity Ventures.
SaaS BI, as online business analysis software is called within the industry, is full of competitors. Tableau Software, which is planning to IPO, along with GoodData, Domo and others, have been successfully selling to big companies who need complex integrations to best analyze their own data. On the low end, Datahero and Chartio provide quick and inexpensive ways for a small business to get some quality integrations.
RJMetrics has focused on what ecommerce companies need, Moore explains, although he notes that its clients range from online gaming companies to nonprofits. The secret isn’t some magical new type of BI software, but a better focus on lucrative online transactions businesses. If an online retailer wants to analyze how colors of different types of hats are selling against each other, for example, a non-technical sales analyst at the company could go into RJMetrics and quickly create a visual explaining what’s happening.
The company promises to replicate client data to hosted, secure servers and optimize it for analysis within seven days, versus the months required for more complex products, with a set of APIs developed around systems that ecommerce companies are already using. Then it makes a dashboard of data visuals available to the company, including key stats for transaction businesses, like customer lifetime value, repeat purchase probability, and cohort analysis on database segments. This lets a company answer questions like which types of customers are likely to regularly buy red fedora hats. For clients with technical staffers, it provides access for them to run their own queries on more complex data sets hosted on its own servers. Prices for the basic version of the online service start at $500 per month.
Fab cofounder Jason Goldberg has written effusively about his experience with RJMetrics, and how its analysis helped him prove Fab’s worth to investors when it raised $40 million in 2011.
From a fundraising standpoint, providing access to the RJ data basically said to the VC’s, “here we are, here’s the data, we’ve got nothing to hide, take a look and decide for yourself if you want to pursue investing in Fab.” Effectively, we turned the pitching on its head. Since the RJ data updates several times per day directly from our database, it was many times more powerful than providing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets. This was the real stuff, auto-updating! And, since RJ enables all the data to be downloaded into excel, the analysts at the VC firms were able to do all of their own analysis on the front end of the investment process.
The core RJMetrics product grew out of Moore’s own data analysis work (which has separately resulted in some great guest posts for TechCrunch, like this formative 2009 analysis of Twitter user behavior). The new funding round, which includes participation from existing investor SoftTech VC, will go towards sales and marketing. With the overall growth in the Saas BI industry, Moore says it’s time to focus on the ecommerce part of it.
After a long decade of media destruction, no one in the industry was surprised to see “Reporter (Newspaper)” ranked as the worst job of 2013. But life is starting to look better for some online publications — like at Vox Media. Its SB Nation network of local sports sites has become a foundation for a national edition, tech-oriented news site The Verge, and most recently video gaming site Polygon.
On the business side, it has begun cracking the display advertising market.
The CEO who is behind its ongoing growth is Jim Bankoff, who you may also know as the guy who previously led Aol’s content businesses for many years. He’s going to have a couple of newsy things to say about Vox and the business of high-quality media today when I interview him Monday at Disrupt NY. If you’re interested in media, advertising, and startups trying to get into these industries, you’ll want to see this.
Tickets are available here.
He joins our list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Nasty Gal’s Deborah Benton, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, and hardware creator Limor Fried, with more still to be announced.
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.
Jim Bankoff
Chairman & CEO, Vox Media
Jim runs all aspects of Vox Media, one of the fastest growing online publishers, focused on the sports, personal technology and gaming categories. Vox is solving the problem of developing high-value digital journalism, storytelling and brand advertising at scale. Its audiences are among the most engaged and affluent on the web.
SB Nation, its sports brand, boasts over 30 million users per month across 300 individually branded, fan-centric sports communities, each covering a specific professional or college team, league or sport. In November 2011, Vox Media launched The Verge, which has quickly established itself as a category leader and the fastest growing site that covers technology. In October, Vox launched Polygon, a site dedicated to news and community for fans of gaming, anchored by an all-star roster of writers. All Vox Media sites are built upon, Chorus, its world-class proprietary publishing platform.
The company enjoys support from leading investors including Accel Partners, Comcast Interactive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Allen & Company.
A veteran of the online industry, Jim developed and led dozens of the most popular websites on the Internet including Aol, Mapquest, Moviefone, AOL Music and Engadget as an Executive Vice President at Aol. He co-founded TMZ.com and also oversaw Aol’s industry-leading instant messaging services, AIM and ICQ, and social networking and community applications including Blogsmith and Netscape.
His accomplishments have earned him wide recognition, most notably the first Emmy ever awarded to a webcast, for his role as Executive Producer of the Live 8 concerts online. Jim also serves as a Senior Advisor at Providence Equity Partners, the largest private equity firm focused on media and communications.
Chris Dixon is back in New York quite a bit, he tells me, even though he recently got a place in San Francisco as part of his new job as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He’ll be at Disrupt NY the week after next, for example, to talk about his big transition from life as a founder and angel investor to his new job at a top venture firm. I’ll be interviewing him about what he’s planning to focus his new portfolio on. Bitcoin startups? Less consumer startups? More gadgets and wearable health devices?
For those who don’t know, Dixon has paved the way for this generation of New York tech founders. He most recently cofounded recommendation service Hunch, which sold to eBay for around $80 million in 2011 and became an R&D office for the company in the city. Before that he cofounded SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee in 2006. He gradually moved deeper into angel investing over the years, becoming prolific over the last couple.
His background and hands-on approach to helping founders got a16z’s notice and they hired him on last year (his great reputation also got him the Angel Of The Year award at this year’s Crunchies).
Dixon joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes eBay CEO John Donahoe, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, top investor Fred Wilson, and more coming to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Buy tickets here.
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.
Chris Dixon
Partner & Co-founder, Founder Collective
Chris Dixon is a Partner at and co-founder of Founder Collective. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch.
He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. In addition to his work with Founder’s Collective, Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode.
Silicon Valley didn’t believe in actor-investors, just a few years ago. Then Ashton Kutcher stepped in and started making a bunch of smart, well-informed bets. He has money in Skype, Foursquare, Flipboard, Airbnb and Path, as well as less consumer-y startups like Optimizely and MemSQL. He’s continued into a solid range of earlier-stage startups via his own investment fund, A-Grade.
He’ll be joining us at Disrupt NY to talk about his firm’s current approach to investing and the trends and products he’s thinking about these days. And, he may share a little more about the Jobs movie he’s been working on.
Ashton joins our list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Chamath Palihapitiya, John Donahoe, Roelof Botha, and Ron Conway, with more to be announced. Tickets and Startup Alley packages are available here.
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.
Ashton Kutcher
Ashton Kutcher is an actor, tech investor and producer. In 2011, Kutcher created a venture fund, A-Grade Investments, with Ron Burkle and Guy Oseary. A-Grade has invested in multiple tech companies including Spotify, Airbnb, Foursquare, Fab, Uber, Dwolla and Path. Kutcher is also co-founder of Katalyst, a media company creating original content for digital media, television and film. In 2010, Kutcher was named one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People. In that same year, his company, Katalyst, was named one of the year’s Top 50 Most Inspiring Innovators by Ad Age and one of Fast Company Magazine’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies.
Currently Kutcher stars in the CBS comedy series “Two and a Half Men.” Averaging more than 14 million viewers per week, the show ranks as the second most-watched comedy on all of network television. Kutcher first gained recognition as Michael Kelso on the Fox/Carsey Werner series “That 70’s Show,” which aired for eight seasons. Kutcher went on to star in a variety of box office hits on the big screen, including “What Happens In Vegas” with Cameron Diaz, “The Guardian” with Kevin Costner, “Valentine’s Day,” “No Strings Attached” with Natalie Portman and the cult hit “Dude, Where’s My Car?” Kutcher has long been recognized for his tech investments and social media prowess, beginning with Twitter. In 2009, he was the first Twitter user to obtain 1 million followers, beating out CNN in a highly publicized race.
Online display advertising has been a murky business — who is actually viewing all those ads, and do those ads make a difference to them? Quantcast has been quietly trying to solve this problem since 2006, and now it’s starting to break out.
I’m hearing from a reliable industry source that it has been EBITDA-profitable for a couple of years and reached a $100 million revenue run-rate six months ago. That number, I’m told, should go significantly higher by the end of 2013.
What’s going on here? Quantcast sits in an interesting market position. You’ve most likely heard of it for its precise public traffic data about websites and apps via tracking pixels that publishers install on the pages of their sites. On that front, it is competing against comScore, Hitwise, Omniture and other digital-measurement firms.
But these pixels are enabling its growing ad business, too. Essentially the company tracks users by pairing pixel data with browser cookies, and models it all out to generate profiles about the users of each site without collecting personal information.
It then works with publishers to help them target their own ads, or it sells ad inventory directly to advertisers. Either way, the ads are reaching users in real time based on their interests and browsing habits, via the company’s big data technology.
Given the broad shift to mobile usage it has also recently added features for mobile web and app data, via tracking software installed by its publishing partners. I’ve included a couple of screenshots of that data, one for reading site Goodreads’ mobile usage and another for the top 10 sites it tracks.
This all sounds fancy, but do people use it? The company is now working with more than 1,000 brands, and more than half of the top 1,000 publishers on the web, CEO and cofounder Konrad Feldman tells me. It is processing more than 800,000 transactions per second.
I don’t have a better view of its financials, but the revenue numbers I’m hearing indicate everything has come together well after all these years.
One big reason is the growth of ad exchanges, Feldman says. Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AppNexus, Rubicon, Pubmatic, OpenX, Yahoo’s Right Media and others provide online ad tech companies and publishers with a place to sell their inventory. Advertisers and their agencies can bid on this inventory and run campaigns across the Internet.
Quantcast has found its place in this ecosystem by helping buyers pull the most relevant ads from the exchanges and target them immediately to the right users. Competitors in this ad-targeting area include Turn and Rocket Fuel, with others like BlueKai providing some of the same sorts of ad-targeting tools for publishers.
If you’ve noticed higher-quality ads appearing to you on your favorite websites in recent years, it is probably one of the companies you can thank (or blame, if you hate ads in the first place).
The big problem for online publishing and advertising is that most of the ad dollars are still being spent on television. The shift to web has already happened for search, given that Google can target and convert purchases much better than traditional media ads. But many advertisers and ad agencies still feel most comfortable with the time-tested TV format for massive audience reach.
It was this problem — using big data to help advertisers and publishers succeed on the web — that first intrigued Feldman. He’d previously started and sold a security compliance firm for large organizations, eventually discovering that the market size was just not that big.
Feldman cites MLB.com’s experiences with Quantcast as an example of how the advertiser shift is taking place.
“MLB teams want to sell tickets — they have that in common,” he explains as an example. “But audiences in each local market are different and change fast over time, based on factors like what else is happening in the home team’s city that day, how well team is playing, who the visiting team is, etc.
Giants fans probably care more about a game against the Dodgers than against the Brewers.
“Rather than hypothesize about how these factors are affecting interest and prices that fans will pay,” he continues, “we track how users who care about this team are behaving, compare it against all of our other data on baseball ticket buyers, and target users who will want to buy right now.”
The result of MLB’s campaigns? It spent 20 percent of its online budget with Quantcast last year, but got 40 percent of its sales out of it, with users buying tickets twice as often as other online ad channels.
What’s next for the company? Having raised $64 million in three rounds to date, and now able to fund its own growth, it’s investing across its organization.
It now has 335 employees, with 100 people joining last year and another 75 on board so far in 2013. When I visited Feldman at the company’s San Francisco headquarters the company had already nearly filled up two floors of its SOMA office building and was struggling to figure out where it was going to put everyone as it continued to grow.
Beyond large volumes of new employees, it’s also been bringing on some industry leaders. OpenTable CEO Matthew Roberts is joining its board. With his many years of executive experience, including its IPO, the addition could hint at an IPO for Quantcast in the near future. Although on that point of speculation, Feldman hedged.
“I can tell you we’re focused on building an important, substantial and enduring business and that means having the very best leadership across our entire organization, including our board. Matt brings perspective and experience that will be valuable today and in the years to come, whatever that may bring.”
Anyway, Quantcast has also been filling out its ad sales team with a string of senior hires in recent months.
David Scacco, Google’s first ad exec, will be running its partnerships with search and SEM advertisers and agencies to try to grow its display business. Another former Google exec, Peter O’Sullivan, will be focusing on large advertisers in the Western U.S. Another long-time ad sales leader, Rick Boyce, will be leading corporate sales in North America.
Here are some other momentum points to note. The company has also recently opened a big new office in Dublin, where it plans to hire more than one hundred people in the next couple of years. In addition to the mobile features, it has also recently acquired ad-data startup MakeGood.
In a community-friendly (and technically hiring-friendly) move it has also open-sourced its file-system software and has other companies using it.
There’s a lot to like about Quantcast. For publishers, it provides a great alternate data set about your own traffic and about anyone else you’re trying to research — and it helps you make money. For advertisers and users, it helps ads matter more.
And, on a personal note, Feldman is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. I first met with him over a year ago, on the day I got the TechCrunch editor job. As I walked out of the meeting, preparing to face a very screwed-up situation, he pulled me aside and gave me some advice I haven’t forgotten: ”Some days are going to be terrible, but all that matters is that you keep trying, and keep moving towards your goals.”
He’s lived that with Quantcast progress over the years, and it’s been on my mind as we’ve turned TechCrunch around this past year.
