Yodle is a startup that provides local online advertising across search engines and other web real estate.  Yodle is based in New York and has raised $10 million Series C from JAFCO Ventures, the DFJ Growth fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Yodle started in 2005 and reports that they have increased 700% in annual revenue compared to 2007.  The run rate for their fourth quarter in 2008 was about $30 million.  Yodle has about 9 people in staff in 2006 and now they have 250 people.  The company has over 5,000 customers.  They had 125 in 2006.  The company expects to make a profit in about six months.

Yodle helps small businesses advertise their products on search engines and Yodle will track and optimize the ads.  This includes the clickthrough rates, phone calls, and click per action rates.  Yodle has their customers grouped into different sectors such as Beauty & Personal Care, Business & Professional, Health & Medical, Home & Garden, and Travel & Lifestyle.

Yodle was founded by Nathaniel Stevens.  He currently serves as the VP of Media Operations.  Stevens started the company while he was attending Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania.  Stevens was accepted into the Venture Initiation Program, UPenn’s incubation initiative.  Yodle’s first round of funding was $3 million by Bessemer Venture Partners.  Yodle’s second round of funding was $12 million and provided by Bessemer Venture Partners and DFJ.  This gives Yodle a total of $15 million.

[via TechCrunch]

“Yodle has put together a phenomenal management team, and, by filling a local void overlooked by Google and Yahoo – one estimated at $100 billion – has become one of the fastest growing players in local online advertising,” stated Iggy Fanlo, the CEO of AdBrite and the newly appointed member of the Yodle Advisory Board.  Fanlo joins Dr. Michael Kearns, a Professor of Computer and Information Science and the University of Pennsylvania.  Fanlo is also the former President of Shopping.com.

Yodle is a 2 year old company that enables small businesses to become part of local online ad market companies.  The technology behind Yodle is ClickRank, which uses a bidding algorithm for online ads to get the name out for these small businesses.  The unique model that Yodle pushes is to direct visitors of the small business websites to actually call the businesses from the web.  This provides a more of a rapport between the potential customer and business-owner.

This model worked so well that the revenue increase for Yodle was 224%.  To date, 87,609 calls were made.  And in November 2006, Bessemer Venture Partners funded Yodle to help keep the model running.  In the About Us page, I also noticed some more interesting information.  David Rosenblatt also joined the Board of Directors earlier this month.  Rosenblatt is the CEO of DoubleClick, a company that Google agreed to acquire for $3.1 billion.