Apester, the leading digital storytelling platform for publishers, today announced $5M Series A funding led by Mangrove Capital Partners, with additional investments from former AOL CMO Tal Simantov, Wix Co-Founder Gigi Kaplan, Silverstein Properties President Tal Kerret, and Amdocs Founder Morris Kahn (Wellborn Ventures) Mangrove is a leading venture capital firm known for its early investment in Skype, Wix and Rdio. Mangrove Partner Roy Saar will join the Board of Directors as part of the investment He sits on the board at Wix, too.
Apester will use the funding to grow the company through business development, marketing and operations. Based in New York City and launched in 2014, Apester is launching the next generation of digital storytelling by putting the reader at the center of editorial coverage. Apester is one of the fastest growing digital platforms in the world, with more than 200M prints per month and more than 400 leading publishers using the platform including AOL, Telegraph, The Huffington Post, The Next Web, Weather Com, Food Network, London Evening Standard
The Apester platform enables publishers to integrate interactive units—reviews, surveys, personality tests and video quizzes—to complement any editorial story and use the resulting data to shape future coverage. Apester makes any piece of content more attractive and sharable, with an average click-through rate of more than 17% across the entire Apester network (more than 100 times higher than standard banner ads) and the ability to boost social sharing by more than 100 percent. Interactive units can also be used by advertisers to create branded content opportunities that appear native to editorial coverage and directly engage readers.
‘As the evolution of digital storytelling continues, the voice of the reader has been missing to provide consumers with a more complete story and increased influence over the content they consume,’ said Moti Cohen, Founder and CEO of Apester. ‘Apester enables editorial teams to harness the voice of the reader to make every piece of content more attractive, relevant and shared, while increasing traffic and creating a new kind of native advertising unit for publishers. ”
The Apester platform offers seamless integration and a simple, easy-to-use interface for publishers. Interactive units provide readers with a very sleek user experience that makes them more actively involved in the story.
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