Snap Skout Names Steve Nieker Chief Operating Officer

Former CIO and Co-Founder of Sphere to Take Over Operations for Media Technology Startup

 Snap Skout, a media technology startup that automatically surfaces highly-relevant offers and deals to readers through its content driven recommended offers engine, today announced that industry veteran Steve Nieker has been named Chief Operating Officer.

“Steve’s past startups have innovated in two spaces key to Snap Skout's roadmap: online advertising and contextual relevance,” said Aaron Goodin, CEO of Snap Skout. “Not only will Steve be responsible for managing our day-to-day operations but he also will play a vital role in developing a product that drives steady revenue growth for our publisher and advertiser partners.

Over the last 20 years, Nieker has founded and led a series of tech ventures targeting the ecosystem comprising online publishing and advertising. Prior to Snap Skout, Nieker co-founded AdKeeper, which introduced a non-disruptive mechanism advertisers could employ to engage users without interrupting the publisher-reader connection.  Nieker also co-founded and launched Sphere, a revolutionary platform that pioneered the contextual-matching space now commonly associated with companies like Outbrain, nRelate, and Taboola. AOL purchased Sphere in 2008 for an estimated $25 Million. Earlier in his career, Nieker co-founded Waypath, an information site that developed the first Web-wide, blog crawling and text-extraction engine.

“Snap Skout is an A-level team, on the path to a game-changing product, led by a visionary CEO,” said Nieker. “As COO, I bring deep operational roots in software, systems, and product, and will help the team streamline its culture and operations – en route to Snap Skout's inevitable success.”