Greatist Inc., New York-based online publication focused on fitness and health content, has raised 4.5 million US dollar in Series A round. This recent financing increases the start-up's total funding amount to 8 million US dollar. According to the reports, the Series A funding was headed by California-based Floodgate and included investors like Strauss Zelnick, Andy Rusell, John Gardner, David Pecker, Jonathan Miller, Ramit Sethi and Chris Hughes.
The four-year old online publisher that turned to be profitable last year is seeking to raise more finance to create high-touch, custom programs with advertisers like FitBit and Kind, the Ad exchanger said. Derek Flanzraich, CEO of Greatist, wants the company to grow in the fitness and health space. The company's editorial screw is high-quality, like quoting medical publications in its health related articles, and low-output.
According to Flanzraich, with less than 25 percent traffic coming from social media and over half from search, the company has grown 250 percent from last year. Flanzraich added that the company will utilize the funds to add more staffs, on the advertising department, to create additional custom programs like events and original content.
The conventional content tactic has become popular among the growing online publishing startups. Other comparable startups like LittleThings and PureWow have also concentrated on conventional content as they begin the direct sales trades, Flanzraich said.
The company receives ten million distinctive page views per month and have newsletter subscribers of about 2 million. In addition, Greatist is looking forward to turn the brand power to paid customer health venture, MobiHealthNews said citing Derek Flanzraich.
In April 2013, the company acquired Sportaneous, an app for locating nearby wellness classes, as an effort to widen a fresh product that tracks people's fitness activities. However, Greatist has not gone great with the purchase of Sportaneous.
"Everything we do is mobile-first. It would be silly not to -- 70 percent of our audience is mobile or tablet. We imagine that will continue to move in that direction. We spend very little time focusing on our desktop experience, and most of the time talking about the mobile experience. But we're a little wary of the app-first approach." Flanzraich said MobiHealthNews.
Fortune said that the site prints two to three evergreen health articles that are supported by proper scientific research and scrutinized by two experts. Flanzraich said that the company is not undertaking any shortcuts in order to breed page views.
The success of the site, which has high social media shares, is not measured by page views but by engagement and return rates, according to Flanzraich.
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