MashLogic pulls in $2.5M for page view-lengthening browser add-on

September 4, 2009 | Camille Ricketts | Comments |
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MashLogic, maker of a contextual browser add-on that pulls in text and images related to the web site you’re visiting and displays them in pop-up windows, has raised $2.5 million in a first round of funding — touting itself to publishers as a way to keep visitors on their pages for longer, upping ad revenue.

mashlogic-grab

None of the Menlo Park, Calif. company’s investors were listed on the regulatory filing, but it took in $500,000 from Bessemer Venture Partners, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, SoftTech VC founder Jeff Clavier and About.com founder Scott Kurnit in June. A partner from New Enterprise Associates, Krishna Kolluri is also now listed as a board member — possibly indicating that NEA jumped in for this most recent round.

MashLogic basically extends any web site by providing relevant information from other sites in a pop up bubble that appears when you hover over specific underlined words. For example, in a New York Times story on Carnegie Hall, if you hover over the name of the venue, a bubble pops up with its corresponding Wikipedia entry so you can choose to learn more. Many web users have grown to hate these pop-ups because they usually contain unwanted advertising pitches. So it will be interesting to see if MashLogic can escape that stigma.

One way its trying to differentiate itself is by tapping the Twitter trend. Also in June, it added contextual trending Twitter topics and even Twitter profiles to its bubbles. You can even tweet about the content you’re reading without leaving the site you’re on. This is seemingly good news for publishers, but MashLogic is also selling itself to web users as a way to “Take Back the Web” and have all the information they need at their fingertips.

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Photo of Camille Ricketts

About the Author, Camille Ricketts

Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Camille,

    You're right about the stigma of pop-ups, which is why we give our users the option of eliminating the pop-ups altogether. Having said that, our pop-ups NEVER have ads in them, and we've had surprisingly strong retention rates among our users.

    We haven't put a lot of effort yet into explaining ourselves, so it's natural you might get the idea that our value proposition to publishers is that we generate more page views (which is a side benefit of using mashlogic on your site). But the real benefit of creating and sharing a mash of your web site is that any user who likes your site and decides to run your mash will get links back to your site from every relevant web page!
  • paulbaines
    Wow and I thought that advertising was taking a big downturn. Although I see this as a far more progressive format than traditional pop ups, I wonder how long it would take before surfers became annoyed with less than accurate contextual links and someone develops a blocking software. At least for Firefox anyway lol.
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