Oliver Roup

Oliver Roup is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Roup is the founder and CEO of the content monetization service VigLink.

Early life and education Roup was born in Cape Town in 1975 and his family moved to Canada when he was about one year old. Roup obtained a bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from MIT as well as an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He has also served in roles at Echo networks, Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., the BBC’s iPlayer, and the Founders Fund. In a January 2012 interview with Idea Mensch, he was quoted as saying that the inspiration for VigLink came when he “wrote a crawler to count links to Amazon on the web and found that less than 50% were enrolled in the affiliate program (meaning the publisher would be compensated if a purchase resulted from the click)” and that he viewed the discovery as “an indicator that there was room for improvement in the space. Publishers either weren’t aware that affiliate programs existed or found them too time consuming and difficult to use.” He eventually decided to buy Driving Revenue, a competitor with strong sales, and was able to raise $1.1 million from investors. He cites the transition to mainstream practices as a reason for the term “affiliate marketing” being replaced by “content monetization” or “content-driven commerce.”