Technology

Engage:BDRannounced today that it has raised $23.25 million in new funding.

CEO Ted Dhanik told me that this includes both debt and equity funding, and will be used to grow the companyNetZero payments program.

NetZero is designed to address the ongoing issue of long delays faced by publishers before they get paid by advertisers. Dhanik said &the terms are getting worse and worse,& with publishers being asked to wait 30, 60, 90 or even 120 days after they invoice their advertising partners before payment.

Other companies like FastPay have tried to fill in the gap, but Dhanik said these loans can have interest rates as high as 25%. So the team at Engage:BDR (which is publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange) asked itself: &Hey, what if we could just pay publishers the exact same day that they invoice us?&

Rather than making money by charging interest, Dhanik said his company is trying to drive more publishers to its programmatic advertising platform.

&We just want the business — the incremental revenue,& he said.

Engage:BDR says web, mobile and connected TV publishers in North America, Australia and Europe are eligible to participate in the NetZero program, though they&ll need to be approved by the company first.

&If you think about NetZero, you might think: Hey, if therefraud, itpretty dangerous you don&t have the ability to clawback [the payment],& Dhanik said. But apparently Engage:BDR has &a lot of technology in place to qualify them pretty quickly, within the first few days.&

Stationhead, the mobile app that turns its users into streaming radio DJs, got a big upgrade today. Where Stationhead DJs were previously limited to broadcasting live, they can now record their shows, making them available on-demand for anyone to listen later.

The idea behind Stationhead is to democratize and recapture the personality of traditional radio broadcasts — the kind of conversation and personal connection thatmissing from a playlist.

The app includes features like the ability to call guests to join the show, and integration with Spotify and Apple Music. For Stationhead, that means it doesn&t have to make its own licensing deals with the music labels; for listeners, it means that when a DJ plays a song, you&re hearing it stream from the music service of your choice.

That integration will continue with these new on-demand broadcasts — so they don&t really exist as a single, continuous recording, but rather as DJ recordings interspersed with cued-up songs from Apple or Spotify. (Thatpresumably why these broadcasts won&t be available for offline listening.)

CEO Ryan Star (pictured above) has said that he co-founded Stationhead as a result of his own frustrations as an independent musician, particularly the difficulty and cost of getting a single played on the radio.

More recently, he told me that Stationhead is becoming a real alternative for independent musicians trying to get attention, with more than 200,000 shows created since November of last year.

&Some shows are mostly talk, some shows are mostly music, but just having the ability to play the song completely changes the way itconsumed,& said COO Murray Levison.

The company isn&t sharing overall listener numbers, but it pointed to success stories like Burrell Kobe, who said he drove 23,000 streams on Stationhead. (SensorTower estimates that the iOS app has been installed by 110,000 users globally.)

And Star described the Stationhead approach as combining &creative freedom and real human connection. While the most popular Stationhead broadcasts can get more than 1,000 live listeners, he suggested that the connection can happen even when the audience is much smaller: He recalled stumbling on a broadcast where he was literally the only person listening, but the host was &spilling her guts — this was her therapy.&

And by making these broadcasts available on-demand, he said Stationhead is &tapping into something proven to be the most intimate form of communication.&

He added, &For the first time, you&re actually able to create binge-able audio content around these streams.&

We&ve aggregated the worldbest growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you&re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can&t get elsewhere.

Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VPof growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual.

You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curvemarketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here,here and here.

Without further ado, onto the advice.

How do you sponsor YouTube influencers cost-effectively?

Based on insights from Bjarke Felbo of Rune (LinkedIn). Lightly edited with permission.

• Influencers often expect compensation proportional to subscribers, but conversions happen proportional to views. So go after the influencers with high views and low subscribers. Thatthe trick.
• We&ve had the best success with 30-60 second promo spots at the beginning of the influencervideo.
• We&ve seen success depend on the video itattached to and what time of day/week itposted, so we&re strict about setting rules around that. Or, we give them a bonus based on the videoview count to incentivize them to put our spot on a high-quality video.
• Be careful with repeat promotions with the same influencer. These haven&t yielded noteworthy returns for us — even after months. Itlikely that the audience becomes saturated.

For SEO, how much does link building really matter in 2019?

From Nat Eliason of Growth Machine. Lightly edited by Demand Curve with permission.

• Links are still important, but their importance is decreasing steadily. Google is getting better at evaluating content quality, and itfocusing more on that.
• Consider this: Google doesn&t want to be gameable, and domain authority and link building are very gameable. But content quality is not. You can&t fake good content.
• Many major blogs outside of high authority spaces have grown rapidly using less link-building. Much of their energy is instead spent on choosing the right keywords (low competition, but still acceptable volume) and writing useful content that satisfies the searcherintent.
• However, link-building can still speed up the process quite a bit if you&re on a tight timeline, or if you&ve given content 3-4 months to rank and aren&t seeing the results you want.

Growth masterclasses kick off now

Today, the advanced growth masterclasses kick off. They&re all free.

• Validating New Ideas w/ Hiten Shah (FYI, KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg)
• Growth Office Hours w/ Gustaf Alströmer (YC Partner)
• Landing Page Critiques w/ Bob Sparkins (Leadpages)
• Referral Programs w/ Thomas Maremaa (Brex) + Jeremy Gurewitz (Imperfect Produce)
• Advanced Content Writing w/ Nat Eliason (Growth Machine) + Bernard Huang (Clearscope)
• Email Marketing for Ecom w/ Mike Arsenault (Rejoiner)

These are rapid-fire, short, and advanced webinars. They&re not boring introductory lectures. This is some of the best content we produce. Don&t miss these, especially when they&re free.

Enroll here: demandcurve.com/webinars

Whatthe best way to take over a Twitter account from an inactive user?

Based on insights from Andrew Ettinger of Atoms. Lightly edited with permission.

Someone has your brand name as their Twitter handle and their account is inactive. How do you get access to it?

1. Create an ads account with an existing handle you want to swap for the one you&re trying to claim.
2. Go to twitter.com/en/help
3. Click on Account issues -> Claim an inactive username.
4. Submit a case.

You&ll then want your Twitter ads account manager to escalate your case (give them the case #).

This is not guaranteed. Your best chance of claiming that handle will be to have an existing Twitter employee escalate your case.

Demand CurveAsher King Abramson will lead a growth marketing session where he&ll tear down your landing pages and Facebook/Instagram ads in front of a live audience. He&ll deconstruct how effective they are at (1) conveying what you do (2) and doing so enticingly — so that people click.

If you&re attending Disrupt and want to participate, you can submit your assets to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for him to consider.