Snackfeed, a video recommendation site that tries to aggregate the web’s hottest videos, has made impressive progress since its launch last fall. We were first introduced to the site at the DreamIt Ventures (a startup incubator similar to Y Combinator and TechStars) first funding day, and it held its private launch three weeks later. Since then the site has seen impressive growth, with a reported 150,000 unique visitors in November. Snackfeed is currently in private “b’alpha” but TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites by visiting this site and entering the code “snacktastic”.
The site presents videos in a basic feed that is populated with videos shared by your friends, your favorite shows (which you can sign up for during the registration process), and clips that are currently trending in blog posts, Twitter feeds, and other places across the web. Users can also follow eachother using a Twitter-like follow system.
Snackfeed’s Jason Laan says that while the company initially concentrated on an extensive recommendation engine that segmented viewers into personalized channels, it found that most people were primarily interested in watching the web’s most popular clips. The site now serves these first, and then tries to fill in “the gaps” with recommendations based on the user’s favorite blogs, recently watched Hulu and YouTube clips, and favorite topics. The site’s homepage also offers a listing of the web’s current most popular videos to non-members, and acts as a sort of Hype Machine for video. Laan says that the site’s rapid growth can be largely attributed to an aggressive marketing campaign on Twitter and other social sites.
There are a few other players in this space, including ffwd (covered here), which is focused on created a powerful recommendation algorithm that allows users to “channel surf” across the web.
Looks very promising. It’s kicking ffwd’s ass:
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
wonderhowto.com
This one’s a good local one. Their HQ is pretty nice.
There were some hot girls there too.
A regular user (now that me/roomates cut cable). Sweet product. Keep up the great work guys.
Hello, tried to use the code “snacktastic” and it is not working, anyone get it to work?
Try again now, it hit the limit earlier but they’ve extended it.
congrats jason and cc!!
Wonder how many of these type of sites there are going to be, I mean will this ever even turn into a million dollar idea? ..Sadly, yes…why? because of the same reason Twitter did, if you throw enough money and time at it, itll make the creators rich…throw more money, perhaps the investors, its still pretty useless.
same here, “snacktastic” no workie.
Yah, the code does not work for me either….
I didn’t know about SnackFeed. But now I know. I will try this one!
fffff
cccccccccccc
invite code does not work
snacktastic works again – we extended the invite code limit – tc readers burned through the first batch quick – enjoy
A brazilian startup called weshow (with english and spanish versions) just failed trying to do something similar. They lasted for a year and burned $8M in venture capital. The way they used to choose the videos (human employees) and the fact they divided videos by categories is a different aproach compared to snackfeed, though. Good luck for them
So awesome to see your guys progress and success!
Congrats!
Cool site. Crowded space trying to handle video aggregation. I use http://www.haha.com and http://www.popurls.com as my two favorite video aggregators.
Both those sites, don’t generate enough traffic nor revenue. ffwd can be designed in day but like purls & haha & now snackfeed could be big if things are executed right.
and down again… (too many connex)
the site sux… always down and very slow
Thanks for sharing the site, I will include it in my worst web 2.0 websites list
Warning: mysqli::mysqli() [function.mysqli-mysqli]: (08004/1040): Too many connections in /var/www/sf-public/lib/DB.php on line 22
Connect failed: Too many connections
Awesome. Thanks for the post. Looks like a good site.
snacktastic works again – we extended the invite code limit – tc readers burned through the first batch quick – enjoy