Thismoment Raises $17.6M To Help Big Brands Tap Into User-Generated Content
Thismoment, a company that helps businesses collect user-generated content for their own marketing efforts, is announcing that it has raised $17.6 million in Series D funding. — The company says it can …
Context & Ripple Effects
Thismoment's $17.6 million Series D lands in a content-marketing funding cycle that has been building since Outbrain's $35M Series D in late 2011 and accelerated with NewsCred's $25M raise in January 2014 — investors are treating the tools that feed brands non-agency content as a category worth scaling. The pickup by Re/code and Josh Constine alongside TechCrunch shows the story traveled well beyond the company's own announcement.
What distinguishes Thismoment within that arc is the source of the content: rather than licensing or producing editorial material the way NewsCred does, it harvests what customers themselves create and routes it into brand marketing — making the audience both the subject and the supplier of the campaign.
First-order effects
- Big-brand marketers gain a well-capitalized vendor for sourcing user-generated campaigns, giving Thismoment the runway to expand its enterprise sales and product build-out against rivals still on smaller war chests.
- Brands' legal and creative teams take on the immediate work of clearing rights on consumer-made content at scale, since the pitch only works if usage is cleared fast enough for live campaigns.
Second-order effects
- Content platforms like NewsCred, which raised $25M in January 2014 on a licensed-content model, face pressure to answer whether their pipelines should also ingest audience-created material or cede that lane.
- Agencies that bill for produced brand assets see part of their output displaced by cheaper, more authentic customer content, forcing them to add UGC curation and moderation services to retain accounts.
Third-order effects
- If brand adoption holds, the marketing supply chain structurally shifts: the scarce input becomes rights-cleared customer content and the software to manage it, not studio production capacity — a change that would push ad budgets toward platforms and away from traditional production.
- A sustained funding pattern across Outbrain, NewsCred, and Thismoment points toward consolidation of brand content tooling, where scale winners emerge from whoever owns the widest content pipeline regardless of its origin.
The trend: Enterprise marketing stacks are being funded to replace agency-produced content with customer-sourced media, with each successive round raising the bar for what counts as a competitive content platform.