What site has jumped five spots between August and September to become the 13th most visited site in the US, leapfrogging properties like New York Times and Viacom Digital?

Here are some hints: It’s listed on the NASDAQ. It was founded in Israel and its R&D center is located in Jerusalem. It has raised funding from high-profile angel investors Dr. Yossi Vardi and Ron Conway. Can you name the company?

The answer is—Answers.com.

Exemplifying that startups are long hauls, Answers.com, née GuruNet, has been plugging away since its founding in 1999. Ten years later, comScore’s September 2009 data places the reference and Q&A site as the 13th most popular site in the United States, pulling in 56.4M unique users. This is a whopping 25% increase on Answers.com’s August numbers.

I had a chance to speak to CEO Bob Rosenschein this morning, who attributes the increase to a few factors. First, there’s seasonality. Answers.com is familiar with a traffic surge that typically comes this time of year as a result of students getting back to school.

Second, Answers.com has chosen to integrate with comScore using Hybrid Measurement, a combination of server side and census measurement. This may have a real impact because sites that have chosen not to integrate in a similar manner may actually be detrimentally affected by comScore’s ability to gain better metric data from sites that have gone ahead with the integration. This means that comScore’s numbers can be off, but there’s nothing new under the sun here.

The third reason is a bit more interesting as it sheds light on a little known fact. Answers.com consolidated WikiAnswers—its user generated Q&A—site into the Answers.com domain, thereby capitalizing on the aggregated traffic. What’s interesting through is that WikiAnswers is on a tear, with 5.6M answers submitted by some 3.6M registered members. While attention to Q&A products/sites of late has focused on the likes of Vark and Hunch, WikiAnswers has just surpassed the 400-pound Q&A gorilla known as Yahoo! Answers, becoming the leading Q&A site on the web. Bet you didn’t know that.

In 2010 Answers.com will be placing particular emphasis on extending its products into the mobile and social networking arenas. We’ll have to wait and see if these catapult the company’s traffic up even further.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

 Israeli TodaCell has raised a $1M round to be used to market the company’s mobile ad inventory optimization solution that analyzes users’ click patterns across ad campaigns that span category verticals and age groups.Through the analysis TodaCell can go back to advertisers and recommend which campaigns will better perform on any of the inventory in its publisher network.

The technology doesn’t offer a ‘hit-the-ground-running’ proposition as it may take a month or two for TodaCell to analyze a publisher’s inventory in order to make ‘intelligent’ recommendations. Sure, a bit of downside, but I’m not aware of machine-learning technologies that offer instant results.

Another benefit TodaCell presents advertisers is that it’s not a blind network in which it’s unknown where ads will actually be served. Campaigns run using TodaCell do offer this type of transparency in advance, which is an important factor for most advertisers and their agencies.

The first I heard of TodaCell was in mid-2007 when it began pitching the local VC’s and angels, subsequently raising a seed round of $350K. Since then deals with companies such as Taptu, Fring, MobiLuck, MocoSpace and TuneWiki have extended TodaCell’s reach from literally zero to 26M unique mobile users per month (by its own account), split 60% US and 40% Europe.

Assuming this number is true, it situates TodaCell as a top 10 mobile ad network.

This traction may not actually be a complete surprise, considering the company’s founder and CEO is Moshe Vaknin, who was also the co-founder and CEO of ad-server company Checkm8. Vaknin was also a co-founder of AdWise, an online ad targeting company which back in 2001 was gearing for an IPO but imploded when its main customer went bankrupt—ah, the good ol’ Bubble 1.0 days. But clearly, ad-serving is something Vankin knows a lot about, and TodaCell is his first venture into the mobile realm of the business.

The $1M investment comes from AfterDox, an investment group comprised exclusively of angel investors who are all current or ex-Amdocs executives. This is an important point as collectively the group has a rolodex chock full of contacts spanning mobile operators and telecom players worldwide—an obvious benefit for TodaCell.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.