The 19th annual VIATEC Awards recognize technology companies based in Victoria, BC that are excelling in their spaces and contributing to the growth of the tech industry in the region.

The Scale-Up of the Year award is focused on highlighting established companies in the Greater Victoria tech scene that are rapidly scaling operations and revenue.

“I’m thrilled to be recognized as a finalist for the Scale-Up of the Year award,” said Crowd Content CEO Clayton Lainsbury. “We did a ton of work in 2018 to drive 48% revenue growth compared to 2017, and it’s really rewarding to be recognized by our peers for those results. We’ve been active in the VIATEC community since Crowd Content was founded in 2010. We support their goal of growing the tech industry in Victoria, and it’s just a tremendous honour to have them recognize us with this nomination.”

Asked to comment on what was most interesting about his firm’s scale up, Lainsbury stated it’s that the growth has been diversified. “I think the best part of our growth in 2018 was that you can chalk it up to many different factors. Our self-serve marketplace brought on a lot of new clients and added some great new features that helped clients scale their content creation. On the enterprise side of our business, we started working with multiple Fortune 500 companies and saw year-over-year revenue growth of 230%. I’m really proud of these accomplishments, and I’m even prouder that every member of our team contributed to them.”

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

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The company states that its enterprise content program was a strong contributor to the growth, posting a 230% year-over-year revenue increase in 2018. Crowd Content’s enterprise program includes fully managed content creation services powered by the company’s proprietary platform. An experienced in-house project management team and a workforce of 6,000+ professional writers and editors rounds out the service, enabling Crowd Content to deliver publish-ready content at scale to clients.

“As a company, we made several important strides in 2018, but I’m especially excited about the rapid growth in our enterprise division,” said Clayton Lainsbury, Crowd Content CEO. “We’ve built a great team headed by our Director of Enterprise Production, Lisa Rohner, and they’ve done an amazing job servicing and retaining the world’s most prominent brands.”

Lainsbury added that he’s happy to see such a diverse range of clients succeeding with the enterprise program. “We’re working with major retailers, comparison shopping sites, marketing agencies, publishers and other types of businesses. Each of these clients has unique content requirements, and our flexible technology has been a big plus in helping us deliver custom solutions, which in turn produce better results.”

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

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The company shared that both its enterprise content division, which provides some of the world’s largest brands with fully-managed content creation services, and its self-service platform, which lets marketers connect directly with with over 6,000 professional writers, contributed to this growth.

While both divisions saw substantial growth, CEO Clayton Lainsbury highlighted that significant platform upgrades currently being beta tested by select clients have enabled publishers to scale their content in a big way on the self-service platform.

“We’re moving several key power features from our enterprise division to our self-service platform,” stated Lainsbury. “Traditionally, these tools were used only by our in-house managed services team. Now, self-service clients have direct access to these tools and it’s helping them scale their content creation efforts similar to what we’ve been doing in-house on the enterprise side.”

One of these features lets customers create structured templates and converts them to a content editor that writers work within. It allows customers to create highly detailed content at scale because each field within the template can be accompanied with specific instructions, character counts, word counts and SEO requirements. The system performs automatic quality checks to ensure all requirements are met before writers submit the work to the client.  

Lainsbury also highlighted Crowd Content’s bulk upload tool which lets clients order hundreds of content items in minutes, as well as a robust API that lets publishers instantly publish content to their content management systems. “Across these three tools, we’re able to provide publishers a solution that lets them order large volumes of content, ensure their requirements are met and then instantly publish it to their site. I’m not aware of another content service that can offer that.”

When asked to quantify how this helps publishers, Lainsbury shared that one client was able to publish over 2,500 posts in less than a year across multiple properties. “We’re seeing small publishers scale up in big ways using our ecosystem, and I’m excited to bring these new features to all our clients very soon.”

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

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During the period from October 1, 2018 to November 30, 2018, the company generated 90% more revenue than during the same period in 2017. On top of that, during September of 2018, Crowd Content generated 147% revenue growth over September of 2017.

Through its proprietary content creation platform, Crowd Content operates a self-serve marketplace and provides fully managed services for enterprise customers with large-scale projects. “We’ve seen growth this year from both business units,” stated Crowd Content CEO, Clayton Lainsbury. “It’s a good feeling when you have two well-developed revenue streams working effectively. We’re even seeing some customers leverage both self-serve and managed services, which is great.” Lainsbury indicates the revenue split between self-serve and managed services for 2018 is approximately 50%.

Crowd Content credits its underlying technology platform for much of its success. In a recent press release, the company shared it has achieved industry-leading turnaround metrics and quality ratings due to several proprietary features that competing platforms or marketplaces lack, including a gamification algorithm that increases the performance of writers and editors working through Crowd Content.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

Media Contact:
Eric Hoppe
Director of Marketing
Crowd Content Media
eric@crowdcontent.com

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Perhaps most impressive, Crowd Content has reported that the average turnaround time for a 432-word content order is only one hour.

The company also shared that the average rating from customers per order is 4.15 out of a possible 5.0.

These numbers were taken from a sample of the latest 300,000 orders to move through the company’s proprietary content marketplace.

“It’s exciting to share these numbers,” said Crowd Content CEO, Clayton Lainsbury. “Based on our own research, we believe this to be the fastest turnaround time for custom content creation on the Web. More importantly, though, we’re able to do it without sacrificing quality. The fact that our customer ratings remain high across such a large sample of orders shows that the content is matching and exceeding customer expectations.”

Aside from a meticulous selection process when accepting new writers, Lainsbury attributes a mature gamified technology platform to the above-average performance. “From day one, we’ve leveraged technology and gamification to improve the experience at Crowd Content. The platform is designed to maximize performance in key areas like speed, quality and reliability. For clients, this results in faster turnaround times, higher-quality content and fewer missed deadlines.”

When asked if these performance metrics are translating to financial success, Lainsbury indicated that the company saw 85% revenue growth in Q3 2018 over the same period in 2017. “We’re performing in areas that make a difference for customers, and that makes it easy for them to stay with us. When you combine that with our recent investments in customer acquisition, it sets a foundation for growth that we expect to continue into and throughout 2019.”

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

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“We’re very excited to see another strong financial year to follow up from the 57% revenue growth we saw in 2016,” said Clayton Lainsbury, Crowd Content’s Founder and CEO. “Topline revenue was driven by sharp increases in enterprise business after acquiring several new Fortune 500 customers.”

The content creation company has been able to penetrate a retail segment where its services are desperately needed. Customers such as Bloomingdale’s, Michaels and 3M, to name a few, use Crowd Content to create compelling content at scale for their product pages. These large brands often have hundreds of thousands of SKUs, making it impossible for in-house teams to write, review and manage product copy on a consistent basis. Crowd Content’s enterprise service lets these brands offload those tasks and focus on their core competencies.

“Two things we’ve learned are that the world’s best brands can’t waste time managing content and can’t afford to publish subpar content,” stated Lainsbury. “Customer retention has been exceptionally high because our focus is on delivering publish-ready content. For customers, this means they save time and money by not having to review, edit and revise content before it goes live. It also means they can trust that published content is accurate and designed to sell their products.”

Lainsbury credits the company’s mature technology and refined production process for the success in attracting and retaining large accounts. “For the past two years, we’ve made it our goal to be the best at helping brands create publish-ready content at scale,” he said. “It’s really been a team effort from our development and production teams. They’ve built the platform to handle the volume while adding key layers of quality review throughout the process. It all comes together to create a smart content engine that works for both writers and customers.”

In a recent press release, Lainsbury stated that with its production capabilities running at full speed, Crowd Content will be investing more resources into sales and marketing for 2018. Considering the company has been primarily focused on R&D to this point and hasn’t had a formal marketing effort in place, it expects to see growth increase as customer acquisition campaigns are implemented.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

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With more than 10 years of experience in digital marketing, Hoppe fills an important gap on the Crowd Content team. With six of those years spent as a key player at competing content firm Constant Content, Hoppe brings a relatively large amount of experience and insight in an industry that, while growing quickly, is still young.

“The first thing you notice about Eric is his passion for the content space,” said Crowd Content founder and CEO, Clayton Lainsbury. “It’s contagious. That energy combined with his analytical approach and digital marketing expertise makes him a valuable asset to our company. We’re lucky to have him in a leadership position as we continue to expand.”

When asked about joining Crowd Content, Hoppe stated, “I’ve always admired Crowd Content for its intuitive platform and its unmatched commitment to producing quality content. The word ‘quality’ gets tossed around a lot in this space. But with Crowd Content, you can truly see they’ve put the R&D resources into building a world-class platform, ensuring clients get an exceptional experience and quality content that performs. It’s exciting to be a part of that.”

Up until this point, Crowd Content has primarily relied on word of mouth and organic search traffic to attract new customers. Hoppe will be the first dedicated marketing leader in the company. “The development of our technology and production process has always been top priority, and that’s where we’ve put our resources,” said Lainsbury. “We really feel that now those two components are the best in the industry, so we’ll be investing more into sales and marketing for 2018.”

Despite not having a formal marketing effort in place previously, Crowd Content managed to grow revenues year-over-year by an average of 57% in 2016 and 2017. By shifting its strategy to customer acquisition, Lainsbury expects to surpass that rate by the end of 2018.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

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With more than 20 years of experience in consumer research and brand marketing for global brands such as Smirnoff, Jose Cuervo, and Baileys, Rohner brings a wealth of experience to the young and growing company. Specifically, over the last ten years, she managed the production of high-volume content creation programs for top  retailers such as Cooking.com, Williams-Sonoma, and Staples, where she was responsible for delivering thousands of publish-ready content pieces.

“Anyone who sits down with Lisa for five minutes realizes she was born and bred for this role,” said Crowd Content CEO, Clayton Lainsbury. “When it comes to quality assurance and content production in general, there is no replacement for experience. That’s what Lisa brings. She understands that great content turns shoppers into customers. More importantly, she knows how to deliver that content at scale to brands and retailers.”

Rohner saw promise in Crowd Content when she compared it to other companies in the space. “I’ve been in this business for a long time, and Crowd Content impressed me straightaway as it doesn’t operate on the ‘good enough’ principle,” stated Rohner. “Its dedication to becoming a best-in-class enterprise content platform makes it clear that this company will become the leader in the managed content space.”

Based in the New York City area, the addition of Rohner also adds an East Coast presence to the Victoria, BC based Crowd Content. This announcement comes shortly after Crowd Content released its first half earnings for 2016, where it reported 44% revenue growth over the same period in 2015, crediting much of its growth to increased enterprise business.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

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Crowd Content reported top line revenue growth of 44% for the first half of 2016 over the same period in 2015. They also report that prepaid revenue (payments by customers for services in advance) has risen by the same percentage, indicating that revenue growth for the remainder of 2016 should continue.

Crowd Content’s founder and CEO, Clayton Lainsbury, says the growth is a combination of their self-serve platform’s outstanding performance and a new influx of enterprise business. “It’s exciting to see the growth come from two parts of our business. On one hand, we have our self-serve marketplace where customers can interact with and hire content creators all on their own, with our easy-to-use platform. This marketplace helps thousands of customers create content on virtually any topic — and it happens quickly, with the average turnaround time for a 360-word document only one hour. On the other hand, we’ve also grown the enterprise side of our business where we help retailers and hyper-localized companies manage high-volume projects, creating a thousand or more pieces of content per week.”

Crowd Content attributes their unique, gamified approach and proprietary technology as drivers for all aspects of the business. By rewarding content creators for positive results (like high ratings and quick turnaround times) and by keeping the process fun and engaging (through game-like concepts such as leveling up, bonuses and status), Crowd Content is able to motivate its workforce on a higher level than platforms that rely on pay only for motivation.

These results come shortly after Crowd Content was recognized as a finalist for “Emerging Technology Company of the Year” and “Employee of the Year” (Matt Martin) at the 2016 VIATeC Technology Awards. In the second half of 2016, Crowd Content plans to continue focusing on growing its enterprise business and anticipates further growth into 2017.

About Crowd Content: Crowd Content is a content creation company based in Victoria, BC that helps brands and agencies create online marketing content at scale. The company is backed by well-known angel investors including Todd Dunlop (founder of Neverblue Media and RingPartner) and James DeGreef (founder of GenoLogics and Tectoria Venture Partners). For more information, visit www.crowdcontent.com.

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