Skyrider, a Mountain View, CA-based company has just announced that $12 million has just been added to the company bank account from investors ComVentures, Sequoia Capital, and Charles River Ventures. Skyrider has also raised $8 million within the last two months.
The way that Skyrider works essentially is by taking over certain search results for keywords in which there is an advertising opportunity.
Skyrider adds a link to a website that sells concert tickets if a user searches for band names in P2P software, Limewire. Skyrider is aiming to make money from these ads similar to how Google is making money from search engine results.
The advertisement is part of the search results but will be mainly depicted by all capital letters. This helps the advertisement differentiate itself from spam. The advertisement will be displayed in the top results and if a user clicks the ad, then the default Internet browser will open the ad.
Currently, Skyrider is a first to market for P2P advertisements on a large scale. Skyrider is pulling together millions of search queries and will soon be processing hundreds of millions of queries per day. Statistics say that searches queries made on Yahoo! and Google are roughly the same number of searches made on P2P networks.
Skyrider was founded by Dr. Ori Cohen and Stas Khirman. Both of these founders previously created Narus, which is a leader of software and technology in the telecommunications and government agency industry.
