Trada Secures Additional $9M In Funding From Google Ventures & Foundry Group

Trada, the crowdsourced PPC marketplace, has secured an additional $9 million in funding from their existing investors, Google Ventures and Foundry Group.

This additional seed of Series D financing brings the total money raised for Trada to $17 million.

Trada basically lets you offload your PPC management onto a community of SEM experts, who spend the budgets you set up as they see best. The money is spent on Google, Bing, Facebook and other PPC platforms and Trada handles the payment exchange between the SEMs and the company advertising, while taking a small percentage of that spend.

Trada’s CEO told TechCrunch that they hope to be “profitable by the end of 2012.”

In January 2011, the highest earning Optimizer (paid search or Facebook expert) in the Trada marketplace earned $4,500 for the month. Last month, the top earner made $14,500, or $175,000 annualized earnings. And at the beginning of 2011, the startup’s largest advertiser had a monthly budget of about $35,000 per month. Today, Trada’s largest advertiser budget is $500,000.

Tim Mayer, former Yahoo executive, formerly worked at Trada and recently left last month to found a new company called “Heddle.”

Related Stories:

• Crowdsourced SEM “Marketplace” Trada Raises $5.75M From Google Ventures & Others
• Tim Mayer: Search Vet & Ex-Yahoo Lands At Trada

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.