Ranker, a site for listing and ranking anything and everything, announced Monday that it has raised a $1.3 million Series A round of funding led by Tim Draper at Draper Associates. Draper is joined by Rincon Venture Partners, Newport Coast Investments, Factual founder Gil Elbaz, Pasadena Angels and previous investor Siemer Venture Capital.
Previously, Ranker had secured nearly $2 million in seed funding in two separate rounds, each a year apart, from CEO and founder Clark Benson, Siemer Venture Capital, Tech Coast Angels and several unnamed angel investors.
If you like making lists of your favorite things and ranking them, this is the website for you. Here are the top five currently most viewed lists, each with at least half a million views:
- Top 10 Anti-Gay Activists Caught Being Gay (1153039 views)
- The 13 Sexiest Psycho Girlfriends in Internet History (927166 views)
- Cheapest Colleges (740228 views)
- Top 30 Hottest Jewish Women Under 40 (520061 views)
- The 16 Most Shameful Politican’s Daughters (506557 views)
Besides just having regular lists that any user can make for him or herself, there are also crowd-ranked lists, like The Greatest Guitarists Of All Time, where everyone’s votes affects the ranking.
The previous time I wrote about Ranker, last November, the service had just racked up a million users. It took the site a little over a year to reach that size from its August 2009 launch. Now, Ranker reports that it sees over 1.5 million monthly uniques and serves over 25 million monthly ad impressions.
While advertising is currently Ranker’s primary source of revenue, the company also makes money through e-commerce leads and has plans to make even more by giving third parties access to the site platform. That’s where some of this new funding is going toward, besides data set development work. The site has also been going through a bit of a redesign and some small tweaks to better integrate social login.
