Wetpaint Raises $25 Million and Launches Wetpaint Injected
Big news tonight from Seattle based wiki/social networks startup Wetpaint (we covered their growth spurt last week): they’ve raised a $25 million third round of financing, bringing the total amount of capital raised to nearly $40 million, and they’ve launched an embeddable wiki product called Wetpaint Injected.
The round of financing was led by DAG Ventures, with investors from previous rounds also participating.
Wetpaint Injected was internally called “Balco” - it is an embeddable version of a Wetpaint wysiwyg wiki for third parties. It isn’t a simple javascript or Flash embed. It’s a deeper integration that requires an insertion of code into a site’s back end application files. That allows the wiki to be created at the server level, not simply rendered in the user’s browser like most widgets. The idea is a pretty straightforward way to go about doing this, but has significant SEO benefits for the partner because the wiki content is embedded directly into the HTML of the website.
The product can be tailored to match a site’s look and feel, and can use an existing sign in system to avoid new account registration. Launch partners include Flixster, IGN, and Nuwire (IGN screen shot to right, see it here). The product is free for publishers to use for up to 100,000 impressions per month - over that and Wetpaint charges either a revenue share or CMP basis.
