Curation platform Scoop.It announced a $2.6M round of funding from its existing investors – Partech International, Elaia Partners, IXO Private Equity, and Orkos Capital – in order to fuel acceleration. The company has picked up YouSendIt’s (recently renamed HighTail) former director of Marketing (I hope he wasn’t in charge of the name-changing) Andrew Federici as VP of Monetization, as the company looks to monetize the more than 75 Million visitors to the site since its launch in 2011.
Competing directly with services like Lausanne-based Paper.li (for whom I have written articles in the past), as well as indirectly with magazine-like content curation platforms like Flipboard and Pulse (recently acquired by LinkedIn), Scoop.it currently monetizes by providing lead generation, analytics, and customization to premium accounts; Allmyapps‘s blog is a good example of how companies can replace their corporate blog with a curated one.
I spoke with Marc Rougier, Co-founder & President of Scoop.it, about the future of Scoop.it.
Priority is growth, and reinforcing Scoop.it’s position as the leading platform for publication by curation for pros and businesses. And by “platform” we mean more than the tool; there is the tool, of course, but there is also the community: more and more people connect with each other by “interest” ; and curators also actively share content with their peers.
Speaking with Rougier last year, we discussed the convergence & divergence between Curation & Creation, namely how curation has given millions of internet users who don’t necessarily have the creative force or desire to create content the ability to weave together their opinions, thoughts, experiences, or expertise by stiching together a select subsection of content created on the web. Curators pull from a pool of seemingly infinite content, meaning that each curator can find identity in the unique subset of content that they curate, curating their own voice.
h/t to Rebecca Grant of Venturebeat