Decline in Funding for Social Media Monitoring
The Statistics Don’t Lie
Late-stage financing for social media monitoring and analytics companies has all but dried up. With exits sagging, clearly this fad has reached its conclusion. Over the past year, $128M has been invested in such companies across 25 deals. This represents a decline of both funding and deal flow by 39.9% and 28.6% respectively as demonstrated in the graph below:
Late-stage financing for social media monitoring and analytics companies has all but dried up. TSG Enterprise. The Startup Garage
Of Those That Have Exited
The majority of exits have consisted of small, early stage companies who never achieved critical mass and who were acquired by larger, household companies primarily for talent or technology. The most notable exit came from Radian6 which was acquired by Salesforce in 2011 for $326M, which was nearly 3X larger than all 25 exits in the past year.
Big Picture
If you are a social media monitoring or analytics company, get out while you can. If you are thinking of launching or investing in one, think twice and definitely rethink your exit strategy.
Graph thanks to CB Insights.
