Headliner.fm, a site where users promote each other’s content, is taking on a new name, CoPromote, and announcing that it has raised $1.8 million in seed funding.
If you’re a CoPromote user, the site recommends content that’s relevant to your interests, which you can then share on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks. You can enter your own content into the system too, where it’s promoted in a similar fashion by other users. The system uses a virtual currency called Karma Cash, which you receive for promoting other people’s content and pay to promote your own.
Founder and CEO Mike More said the site was originally designed for musicians, but it now serves a variety of creators and marketers, such as bloggers, charities, app developers, small businesses, and online video producers. The “fm” in the company name continues to confuse some people, making them think it’s still limited to musicians, which is why the company is now rebranding as CoPromote.
More acknowledged that there are other services, such as Klout, trying to sell businesses on getting posts and tweets from social “influencers”, but he said they’re mostly focused on large brand advertisers, not the smaller content creators and content marketers that CoPromote is targeting. He added that advertising on a site like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube doesn’t make sense for these marketers, because “they do not deliver the one action which content marketers value the most: shares or retweets in a manner which [makes] economic sense.”
The worry, I suppose, is that people feel incentivized to just spam their followers with random links, but that’s why More emphasized CoPromote’s ability to match relevant content with the right users, as well as the effectiveness of the company’s campaigns. The product is supposedly used by 45,000 people daily, and that it leads to 26 times more sharing of a post.
You can use the service for free, but you have to pay for features like the ability to run more than one campaign at once.
The funding was led by ff Venture Capital (which recently raised a new fund of its own) with participation from Correlation Ventures, AlphaPrime Ventures, The Social Internet Fund, and Greg Raifman, president of Rubicon Project.
