Is there room for a video-sharing site besides YouTube? Intel Capital, Adobe Systems, and media investor Gordon Crawford are placing their bets on Veoh, which is announcing a $30 million series D financing. Intel Capital is leading the round, and previous investors Shelter Capital, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Michael Eisner and Jonathan Dolgen also participated. This brings the total Veoh has raised to a whopping $70 million.
Veoh wants to move beyond the PC to mobile devices, and is putting a lot of resources behind developing its behavioral ad targeting platform for video.
The announcement also comes a day after Veoh started blocking access to all but 33 countries (plus U.S. territories) in an attempt to focus on the most lucrative markets (and, no doubt, reign in some costs—video streaming is expensive). The countries being blocked, including many in South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, represent less than 10 percent of Veoh’s audience.
That audience, globally, is growing at a nice clip. The company claims 28 million monthly unique viewers, who on average spend 100 minutes a month on the site. And the avreage length of videos watched on Veoh is 10 minutes.
ComScore counts 18.5 million global unique visitors, as of April, and another 8.7 million who watch on the startup’s P2P software client, VeohTV. If you add the two together (the red and purple lines in the second chart below), it comes to 27.2 million, which is about the same as the total reported by the company. That combined total would put Veoh’s audience right below Metacafe’s (28.9 million) and DailyMotion’s (34.6 million).
And it is growing much faster than either one (538 percent over the past year, versus 70 percent growth for DailyMotion and 50 percent growth for Metacafe).
Of course, Veoh and all of these second-tier video sites still pale by comparison to YouTube, which boasted 300 million unique visitors worldwide in April.
You forgot to mention the Metacafe client, one of the web’s most downloaded clients ever which accounts for an estimated additional 30% of their views, placing them way above both Dailymotion and Veoh.
ComScore only counts 2.5 million unique monthly users of the Metacafe app.
good, I like VEOH because the copyright holders tend to focus on youtube. As a result, certain material remains available on Veoh for a longer period.
But now that Veoh has blocked access to 150 countries, I wonder if anybody will be interested in a service with so much limited distribution.
Series “D” for “Deadpool”
It’s good to see Veoh aligning itself with smart tech companies. While Hulu and Joost spend their time sucking up to Hollywood, I’m glad that at least one video site recognizes that the future is not just about content - it’s about embracing technologies that make watching web video even more compelling than regular TV.
They are just iTunes wanna be.
The only reason they added 5 minute preview was because they wanted people to use APP more then website , just watch out what is going to happen now that they got 30 mills!
Telling you Michael…
Erick
Those stat’s are in millions correct? Because site with 20.000 total unique visitors wouldn’t have that many videos, heck just my video was watched over 70.000+ times I have 55 of them more lol
I was talking about video views, not uniques.
“While Hulu and Joost spend their time sucking up to Hollywood…”
Brian,
Hulu IS Hollywood.
@Will:
Very true.
Hulu is indeed spawn of Hollywood… but if they had any guts as a video site, they’d offer more than just branded TV shows and movies.
They are doing great but they close their site for Turkey. Now we cant reach any content of them. The reason $$$ i think.
Congrats to Dmitry (Veoh’s founder). Veoh continues to innovate in the online video space and their traffic growth is a sign that their strategy is working. I think there is room in the space for at least one other player besides YouTube. Veoh now has the largest war chest to play with and a very smart team. I’d bet on them to win 2nd place in the space.
I love how everybody’s praising them for raising $30 million but it seems that NOBODY knows that they blocked access to all but 33 markets/countries.
http://www.zachflauaus.com/?p=17 <– Link to the story I broke on my blog and Gadgetell that NO major markets picked up on.
So sure, woohoo for them getting $30 million.
@Zach, re-read the article. It clearly states they blocked many countries, and only kept the ones worthy of revenue generation. Go back to the commune!
This is silly though, b/c I know a company in the video space that clearly domnates and has WAAAY more than $30M to win. Yeah, Google is ignoring the mobile market o_O ? Serious?
iPhone and Android already under development, hmm.
Verizon is not a company one can work with easily (remember they turned down the iPhone)
Disclosure: I don’t care for the ethics of Intel capital and fail to believe their fund has any potential.
If you check Quantcast’s stats for Veoh - which for Veoh are accurate as they use the Quantcast tracking cookie - it’s more like 15% of visitors that are now blocked. And that includes Brazil, India, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa - we’re hardly talking third world here.
I am glad to see Dmitry, Steve and the VEOH team bring in some more capitol.
I am interested to see how they continue to evolve and grow viewers and engagement. They continue to evolve in ways that I think are quite positive and actually make them quite different from daily motion and Metacafe. I have been a big VEOH fan since early on.
Rodney Rumford
I recently reinstalled the Veoh client to see a video a friend wanted to get to me (I tried it out in the first beta and uninstalled shortly after). Right after the install, my computer crashed and would not reboot. The hard drive was irredeemably fried. I thought it was a coincidence, thinking “how could an application do that?” So, I told a friend about the video, and told him what happened to me. Thinking it had to be a coincidence he installed the Veoh client and it killed his computer in exactly the same way.
Maybe the $30mm will pay for damages to users’ machines, or it’s to fund the Veoh cyberwarfare operation.