WatchMojo.com, a startup that produces professional videos and then syndicates them to social networking and media sites, has streamed more than 50 million videos since its launch in 2006. WatchMojo.com’s content is distributed to Hulu, MySpace, TV.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube as well as newspaper sites. (The Montreal-based startup also produces the business tech blog HipMojo).
WatchMojo’s entertainment videos range from informational content (think About.com or Wikipedia) to parodies to evergreen faux newscasts (we’ve embedded two at the bottom of this post). The site has published close to 5,000 videos on a variety of topics including business, fashion, food, green living, health, technology and politics. Largely in English, its library includes multi-lingual and closed captioned videos as well.
The company says streams of WatchMojo’s videos are steadily growing. They doubled from 13 million in 2007 to 28 million in 2008. Currently the site is averaging 4 million streams per month, with about half of those coming from YouTube. At that rate, it should come close to doubling again this year. WatchMojo.com generates revenue through licensing deals and stock video sales. It also creates branded content and package video advertisements for companies to distribute online.
WatchMojo’s 50 million cumulative video streams is quite respectable for a niche Web video producer focusing on professionally-produced clips. But to put this in perspective, YouTube streamed an estimated 5.3 billion videos in February alone. And Hulu had 332.5 million professionally-produced video streams in February. A better comparison might be Next New Networks, another smaller online video content syndicator, which has had close to 400 million views of its videos, according to the company. That number is spread across 16 micro-video networks, which include Barely Political (home of Obama Girl), ThreadBanger (DIY fashion), and TMI Weekly (Life, tech and style).
Here’s a popular video from WatchMojo showing some freestyle motocross jumps that has been watched on YouTube 1.4 million times:
This one is on UNC’s basketball team:
And here’s one on Wolverine. Apparently, they felt it was so realistic that they decided to run a disclaimer noting that Wolverine does not actually exist, but is only a comic book caharcter. (I kinda got that from the comic book illustrations, but thanks for the warning):
