Last month, ISRAEL21c featured social-quiz platform Playbuzz, which has been the most shared website on Facebook for four months running.
On March 18, the company announced it had raised an additional $16 million in funding, on top of its previous $3.8 million in seed money from Carmel Ventures and FirstTime Ventures. The latest round was led by the London and Tel Aviv-based VC 83North (formerly Greylock), with additional funding from Saban Capital and the existing investors.
Unlike BuzzFeed, to which it is often compared, Playbuzz is a free business-to-business platform that allows publishers, bloggers, brands and other users to create multilingual quizzes, lists and polls for mass social-network sharing designed to engage users, raise page views and increase stickiness.
Founded in December 2013, Playbuzz reports that it now has more than 80 million unique users, and more than half of its traffic comes from Facebook.
People seem unable to resist clicking on quizzes like “Which war movie would you die in?” “Which breakfast food are you?” and “How well do you know beagles?”
Playbuzz Vice President for Content Shachar Orren told ISRAEL21c that playful content is irresistible even in the face of ever-decreasing time spent on any one web page. Some 93 percent of users finish the quizzes they start, and that explains why PlayBuzz content is being used by thousands of brands, including big names such as Yahoo, Cosmopolitan, MTV and AOL.
The company was started by Shaul Olmert, an Israeli tech entrepreneur whose father is former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, along with Tom Pachys. Based in Tel Aviv, Playbuzz has established a New York headquarters and plans to open branches in Asia and Europe. It also plans to add more content formats and monetization options.
“What YouTube did for video, we want to do for interactive, high engagement experiences,” Olmert told Business Insider.