Gather.com gets $10-million for social media
From Liz Gannes over at Gigaom.com comes news that Gather — the social-media site that launched last year, backed by Lotus founder Jim Manzi and several public radio entities — has gotten another $10-million in funding, this time from Pilot Hill Ventures, McGraw-Hill and Hearst Publishing. That makes almost $20-million the site has gotten since it started.
Gather allows users to submit stories, blog posts and links and then vote on them in a Digg.com-like fashion, and also lets them comment on those postings and set up their own blog-like pages within the site. In a twist on the normal model, the network also pays users whose stories or links get lots of views and comments (although Liz points out that it’s not very much).
Another point that Liz makes, which is definitely worth noting, is that Gather hasn’t really racked up a whole lot of traffic given the amount of money that has been poured into the service. It has about 700,000 unique users per months and about 120,000 registered users, according to Gigaom.
Newsvine.com, meanwhile — which has a similar model and was started by several former journalists — has about 500,000 unique visitors a month despite the fact that it has had less than one-tenth the amount of funding that Gather.com has.
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