Chris Wirasinha, the co-founder and CEO of ad tech startup Linkby, says after founding Pedestrian in 2005, running a business as a second-time founder has been much easier because he has a greater perspective on the industry.
“We’re learning so much from how to raise money from venture capital investors to how to grow internationally,” he told Mediaweek.
“Linkby’s two biggest markets are the US and UK respectively, so experiencing how to operate in new markets with their own distinct cultures has been an exciting part of the journey.”
Linkby is a global VC-funded adtech business that connects established and emerging D2C brands with popular publishers, including The Daily Mail, News Corp, Penske Media Co, Dotdash Meredith, The Daily Beast and more.
Brands that use Linkby’s services only pay for clicks back to their website or the impressions on their content.
The company was founded in Australia in 2020 by Andrew Chak, Adrian Fagerlund and Wirasinha, who co-founded Pedestrian Group in 2005 before selling the company to Nine in 2019.
Wirasinha said the idea of Linkby developed in his last few years of working at Pedestrian.
“During my last years there, I saw a huge amount of brands who’d built their businesses off of the back of channels like Facebook and Google looking to explore content opportunities but on a more performance-focused basis,” he said.
“Linkby was inspired by helping brands achieve this by supporting publishers, creators, newsletters and anyone with an audience to offer cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM-based content solutions.”
Linkby is growing rapidly – it has added 15 new staff across the business over the last couple of months and now stands at 60 employees globally.
“We now have over 1,500 agencies and brands using the platform who’ve collectively now driven more than 15 million clicks back to their sites driving millions of new customers and sales to our partner brands,” he said.
“We’re rapidly growing and expanding our Pubfeed product which is an ‘infinite scroll’ management tool for brands and publishers that allows editorially approved content to appear natively in feed. It can be bought on both a CPC and CPM basis allowing for mass distribution of content. It’s the fastest way to break brand news across a huge network of Australia’s most trusted publishers.”
Linkby has offices located in Sydney, New York, and London. Wirasinha stated the NY outpost has been performing particularly well.
“We’ve been fortunate to have Vanessa Lawrence, former publisher of Pedestrian, make the move to lead our team on the ground which continues to expand.
“The US market is our largest and accounts for half of the revenue of the business. We’re working closely with some of the biggest content creators in the world from the likes of USA Today in publishing to Morning Brew in newsletters.”
Most recently, the company made its debut on global affiliate marketing platform Awin’s Power 100 list for 2024, selected from more than 1 million active partners across 35 countries.
This year’s list, says Awin, spotlights “the next-generation affiliates reshaping the industry landscape.” Of Linkby specifically, Awin says it has “revolutionised the way that brands work with premium publishers.”
Wirasinha said Awin is one of the leaders in the global affiliate space and Linkby feels fortunate to work with it across its key markets of USA, the UK, and Australia.
“Being featured on this year’s power list as one of the only Australia-founded businesses is a testament to the massive cut-through Linkby has had globally in just over four years.”