About Eric Porat

A Lifetime of Expanding Digital Boundaries

The online business and ad-tech startup market is a ruthless one, and growing more and more so each year. The Internet has become saturated with cheap, fast content. It’s harder than ever to rise above the morass, whatever your endeavor.

It wasn’t easy, but entrepreneur and investor Eric Porat has managed to do so time and time again, no matter the avenue. This is his story.

Early Roots

From an early age, Porat had an affinity for pursuing cutting-edge technology trends. He also had a knack for building and scaling business ventures. This perfect marriage of abilities took him to the edge of the digital sphere and back again.

Even during his roots in New York, Porat was a go-getter. He qualified for the Maccabi Olympics in both tennis and soccer. He then won a gold medal in tennis. This helped his school’s team win nationals. He also raised more money for the team than any other donor.

After receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in CIS from Baruch College, Eric Porat dove headfirst into the technology sector. It wasn’t a cakewalk, of course. Porat’s first website, which he built in 2005, saw little to no traffic. It was a ghost town. Dauntless, he began experimenting. He tried every social and search traffic optimization method under the sun, taking careful note of the results. In this manner, Porat crafted a following brick by brick, through a painstaking process of trial and error. It paid off.

Within three years, Porat had grown his first website to more than 70,000 visits per month. Shortly after, he received an offer to sell it. This led him to realize that building a website from scratch was foolish. It would be far more effective to purchase small and medium websites that already had traffic and then improve upon them. Since then, Porat has bought and sold over 100 websites with Flippa exceeding $800,000 in transactions alone!

Building an Empire

With all of Eric Porat’s experience in digital marketing channels and online advertising, simple website optimization and sale wasn’t enough to satisfy him for long. His sharp understanding of various failures in the market gave him keen forethought. This allowed him to craft and build products custom-made to solve advertisers’ problems.

In January 2016, he acquired GeoIQ, a web-based analytical platform offering real-time analysis for advertisers, a program to help said advertisers track and optimize their media buying campaigns. Porat was overseeing product development. Still, his primary focus remained acquiring customers for the platform. This would prove that it was going to save advertisers money. With hundreds of different analytics platforms on the market, each targeting a different audience, it was quite difficult to pitch GeoIQ, like any SaaS. Most advertisers were already using multiple analytics platforms for different needs.

To pitch GeoIQ successfully would mean making them commit to using one more and then paying a subscription. The fact that the product required both advertisers and website owners to sign up together made things even harder, especially because initially GeoIQ didn’t have any funding.

Fast-forward one year.

With an enormous amount of funding secured via a partnership, GeoIQ blossomed. At the moment, GeoIQ is the leading analytics platform for advertisers in the world and has more than 75,000 users. The company also recently acquired one of its competitors, Visbrands.

Continuing to Expand

Once strides were made with GeoIQ, Porat went on to found Vayg Holdings LLC, in mid-2019. The first product of the company was Vayg Media, a subdomain leasing brand. Their business model involved leasing subdomains from authoritative websites and analyzing their traffic. This provided valuable insights into brands’ user engagement and opportunities to increase conversion rates.

As he was already building a name for online business ventures, Porat also founded One Acquire Media. This online advertising network sells two types of key traffic: Run of Network traffic (non-targeted traffic), and Keyword/URL traffic (targeted traffic). Now, over 80 advertisers actively use the One Aquire Media platform. Their number is growing daily. Porat has continued buying and selling businesses. Along the way, he’s built an increasingly diversified portfolio and establishing himself as an expert in the sector.

Back in 2018, Eric Porat also launched an e-commerce technology project with a brilliant core concept; a web crawler that would automatically scan thousands of brands’ websites, find products that were on discount, and then link to them with affiliate links.

At first glance, the site looked like an ordinary e-commerce website, but in fact, it was a fully automated platform that was researching, updating, and listing discounted products.

In September 2020, Porat sold this project for a large sum to a buyer interested in the intellectual property behind it.

Investing in the Future

In 2020, Porat began focusing mostly on investing. While he has invested in countless projects over the years, Filecoin is perhaps his personal favorite. The Filecoin project is a decentralized storage network. It turns the world’s unused storage into an algorithmic market. Via this method, it creates a permanent, decentralized future for the web. Porat truly believes this cryptocurrency will change the world.

The project raised over $200 million during its ICO (a period where accredited investors are allowed to partake in SAFT [Simple Agreement for Future Tokens] contracts.) Eric Porat was one of the earliest investors. Filecoin officially launched its main net on October 15, 2020.

Over the last two decades, Eric Porat has evolved as a leader in the digital media and ad-tech space and continues to fan his entrepreneurial flame with new ideas and opportunities. He has collaborated with industry icons, major brands, and some of the digital world’s largest consumer goods and advertisers.

All told, Porat’s experiences have shown him that all the technical and market savvy in the world aren’t enough. They will always play catch-up to pure tenacity and drive.
He’s learned the same lesson from his first website in 2005 to his lucrative large-scale projects in recent years. It’s the willingness to cut through any and all obstacles thrown in his path that has taken him far.

Find out more about Eric Porat expertise on flipping websites here

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