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January 16, 2014 05:19 am GMT

With A Fresh $9M, Contently Looks To Position Itself At The Front Of The New Content Marketing Movement

Screen Shot 2014-01-15 at 4.42.36 PMWhen Contently launched out of TechStars startup accelerator in 2011, content farms were quickly becoming the bane of content producers everywhere. Gumming up search engines with low-quality, SEO-optimized linkbait and shoddy content marketing models, these farms were in the process of jumping the shark. Today, thanks to continuing changes in publishing business models and digital advertising, content marketing and native advertising are the buzz du jour. Newsrooms are shrinking, and as we saw recently, freelance marketplaces grown rapidly. As these trends slowly re-shape the publishing industry, New York City-based Contently finds itself well-positioned to take advantage of the new era of brand publishing. Over the last two years, Contently has been busy building a marketplace where brands and advertisers can go to connect with freelancers and journalists to commission work on their behalf. The idea is to allow brands and marketers to build content strategies optimized for a new generation of digital-savvy readers, doing so around content — whether it be a blog post, a white paper or a sponsored article — written by real, accredited journalists. In turn, Contently is looking to fight low-quality, hastily-produced linkbait by offering a marketplace for journalists and content producers that compensates them for their work at a much higher rate than will typically be found on the eLances and oDesks of the world. Whereas a writer may be paid $5 to $50 for a blog post listing on eLance, Contently co-founder and CEO Shane Snow says that writers can expect to be paid $275/blog on average on the platform, and can expect to find regular work in the $500 to $1,000 price range. To turn this model into a real business, rather than offering the traditional revenue share with writers in which the platform takes a cut of the price publishers set, Contently licenses the software behind its marketplace to those publishers — along with brands, marketers and agencies. In doing so, Contently’s customers get access to its network of freelancers and journalists, along with workflow and payment tools, and can hire any content producer of their choosing on a project-by-project basis. These subscription fees for publishers allow them access to Contently’s talent and payment solutions, with pricing based on a sliding scale depending on how deep they want to go. This runs from basic access all the way up to plans that include project management software, which he describes as akin to

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