San Francisco based Crunchyroll, a sort of YouTube for anime and other mostly Asian video content, raised a $4 million round of financing led by Venrock Associates, with partner David Siminoff joining the board of directors. The company, which launched in the summer of 2006, was founded by three HotOrNot employees. Our sources tell us that HotOrNot founders Jim Hong and James Young also participated in the round.
We first covered the company in August 2007, and noted that they rely almost exclusively on copyright infringing content. Users, of course, flocked to the site. In July 2007 it had 1.3 million unique visitors (Comscore). In January 2008 that jumped to 2.6 million uniques, and 245 million page views.
Last year the site charged users a premium fee of $6 and included advertisements around content. We pointed out that this weakened their reliance on the Digital Millennium Copyright safe harbor provision, which protects service providers from liability for content uploaded by users. Today the site announced that there are no longer any ads, although the premium account option remains. It looks like they hired some lawyers.
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But still…how do they differentiate themselves from sites like youtube by being just a niche content provider. Being a subset of a bigger business model is just like fattening the animal before the sacrifice.
Peyton
http://www.techbanyan.com
so…….no ads and no premium membership.
they are going to monetise this how? I hear google already bought a video sharing site.
Here’s my take on the funding announcement from this morning:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....sharing-vc
Good points from you and Tony as well on the copyright issues. I think the badge idea could/does work well for a site like this, just like it does on Flickr.
$4 million is a lot of cash.
#2 - they have premium membership - basically badges for donations.
Why would I flock to this site when YouTube has all the content I will ever need? Hmm…..another one for the deadpool..
For the record….I’m Asian….
@Danny — its easy to browse their huge index to find a lot of good stuff (if that kind of stuff is what you’re into), the clips are long as well, as I’ve found ones up to 1/2h in length as well.
As for the VC’s — well, they must have balls that are as big and brassy as I’ve ever seen.
Cheers
t @ dji
The reason Crunchyroll gets users is because they KEEP copyrighted content on their site. Youtube removes a TON of anime, especially licensed anime. Crunchyroll on the other hand does not remove shows unless requested specifically by the distributor/licensor.
#7 - isn’t that how youtube grew and was acquired?
I concur, as much as UGC content is supposedly big these days, it’s still the copyright stuff that rules. Just check out my site and you will see that the view count for shows like House and Heroes is way higher than UGC videos.
Crunchyroll fucking rules. Stop hating the player, Arrington, and start hating the game. The internet is tired of you and duncan riley cloggin’ the intertubes.
p.s. your mom.
It’s James Hong and Jim Young. Too many Asians in one post for you?
Dammit! How come such an illegal site got million $ and rich although most of anime creaters in Japan are so poor. How come such amount of money goes to illegal people, not the creators! something is very very wrong…
Last month I found great site that host many anime movies. That is why I called it Youtube for Anime: CrunchyRoll. As I mentioned in my previous post that to download a high quality movie needs to donate in order to keep the site bandwidth.
CrunchyRoll can drop dead. The people paying for “higher quality” are tools.
First people were all over funding social networks.
Successes: Myspace, Facebook, Bebo, ClubPenguin, Orkut, and maybe 15 other sites including a few niche/international ones.
Failures: everyone else
Then it was all about video sites.
Successes: YouTube, random sites like Snapper or whatever dumb site Sony acquired, platforms purchased by Yahoo, etc.
Failures: everyone else
Then Facebook apps.
Successes: None
Failures: Everyone
I guess stupidity is a vicious cycle.
I love Crunchyroll it has alot of things stupid sites like Youtube doesn’t… It has videos of alot of foreign movies, foreign anime bit it also has a Myspace feel to it where you can meet people and comment, mail, forums, groups,chatroom also has Manga, It has alot of uses… So all of you who hate CR you’re all STFU’s !!!!!!! Yes it’s wrong to use things without the permission of the creator but give me a break 99% of Youtube videos are uploaded without concent either.
Looks like GDH acquired a 2-mil stake on CR
http://www.animenewsnetwork.co.....investment