Lijit, which provides search services to bloggers and blog networks, announced today that it has closed a $7.1 Million series C round led by Foundry Group. Lijit had raised a small Series A round in January of 2007 and a larger $3.3 million Series B in July 2007. With this new round, Lijit is planning to use this new influx of money to finance the launch of its search-powered ad network.
Lijit provides bloggers with an enhanced search engine that not only looks at the content on the blog itself, but also takes a blogger’s social graph into account and allows you to bring together all your activities on other sites as well and make them searchable. Besides search, Lijit also provides bloggers with a comprehensive statistics package (see an example here). Lijit claims that using their search widget can increase pageviews by 5% or more.
Currently, Lijit displays Google AdSense ads in its search results, but its advertising network would allow publishers to sell their own search ad inventory. As many bloggers and publishers are looking for ways to monetize their blogs through services other than AdSense, chances are that there are quite a few people who would like to at least give Lijit’s ad network a chance.
Lijit company profile provided by TradeVibes
