Popular Pays provides a platform that enables marketers to create, scale and manage work with social content creators from creative briefing through contracting, payment and content deployment. Key features include a searchable community of content creators, an automatic brief builder, integrations with social networks for paid media use, contracting and payment automation, and workflow tools for content review, communication, shipping and revision tracking. The product is aimed at efficiently scaling branded content and social posts across networks and formats. The company has roughly doubled in size since its April 2017 Series A and plans to add about a dozen full-time roles in 2019, targeting growth to approximately 50 employees. Financially, Popular Pays has been raising venture funding and continues to expand its commercial platform and team. Popular Pays is a Chicago, IL–based operating system for content creation led by CEO Corbett Drummey. The software lets marketers access a global community of content creators and workflow tools for full creative and strategic control to produce diverse content at social scale. The company has offices in New York City and a team of 40. Popular Pays raised $5.5M in the reported round, bringing total funding since launch to $11.5M. The firm says it will use the new capital to scale its sales and product development efforts. Beringea led the round. Popular Pays operates a marketplace that pairs marketers with creators to generate and publish photos, videos and blog posts for brands. The company emphasizes the value of the content itself over celebrity reach, and it rebrands users as "creators" to reflect their production skills. Popular Pays provides tools for marketers to manage large creator campaigns (hundreds of creators in some cases) and to A/B test content. It has expanded monetization beyond campaign facilitation by licensing its technology and working with resellers. Resellers already account for nearly one-third of the company’s revenue, indicating early traction for that channel. The company sees increasing demand as social platforms shift toward more ephemeral and video-first formats, which should drive need for more creator-produced content. Popular Pays operates a marketplace that connects brands with Instagram users who apply to campaigns and list how much they want to be paid. Businesses post campaign briefs, influencers apply and marketers select participants; Popular Pays provides campaign data and allows marketers to use the submitted photos. The platform has signed up more than 25,000 Instagrammers and has run campaigns for brands including Nike, Coke, McDonald’s, Glenlivet, Postmates and Harry’s. The company says it has been able to scale because it avoids hand-matching between brands and influencers. Popular Pays is expanding beyond Instagram, already running campaigns on Pinterest and exploring Snapchat. The startup must also stay flexible as Instagram rolls out more ad features and the influencer marketplace evolves.

Total raised

$12M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Dec 2018