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):
50m views from 5,000 videos is an average of 10,000 views per video…not to stellar in anyones book…most likely a few 1m+ view videos and the rest stinkers
Thanks for the article.
Hey Meh,
- the actual numbers of videos on YouTube is less than 2,900…
- the actual numbers of videos published on WatchMojo.com is over 4,000…
Some of our partners only have a few hundred videos. Hulu, for example, has 400 of our videos.
If you include our pipeline including what we have yet to publish, then yes, we have over 5,000.
As per the math, we don’t aim to have one video do 100,000 or 1,000,000 streams in one week and then disappear.
We have
- thousands of videos that have done over 10,000 streams
- hundreds of videos with over 100,000
- handful with over 1,000,000
I guarantee if you talk to marketers, they don’t want the one hit wonders… that doesn’t serve anyone’s purpose.
We go for consistent and growing streams… which we have done.
But, nice to see your good at math, we’ll hire you for our Education videos
Watching video online and via iPhone is nice.
Great job. I remember the founder used to post on TC back in the glory days of 2006. I admit I thought it was full of it, but it’s now been proven he was on the right track. Congrats to Mojo.
Who?
So, now the big question. Maybe I missed it, but how do the make money again? Advertising? Syndication? How much do the blow every month doing this stuff?
Hey Device Spy, that is a great question.
While some of our peers have raised over $20M, we’ve managed to not just stay in business but grow revenues and streams with only… look in the Crunch Base widget for the answer.
You don’t need a math degree to figure out the high ROE…
testing out facebook connect.
Great site. The question is, is WatchMojo generating profit?
Sarah
GossipMojo.com
i know first hand how hard it is to start a web video startup. congrats to these guys. I think those are stellar numbers to be reporting.
Thanks Ashot.
hey Sarah,
We have had profitable months in the past, but as of right now we lose modest amounts each month. We should break even by Q4 of this year as our business continues to grow.
Since we do not have VCs to pressure us into laying anyone off, we have decided to go against the grain and invest in the company’s growth, we could be profitable if we chose to, but we think that as companies slash budgets, the need to build content from within will be replaced by a need to buy, be it via licensing or outright M&A.
We never added fat, so this year we can add muscle, so to speak.
you can’t count pre-roll & post-roll streams that disrupt viewers. all this content is crap. tak 25 D-level lame videos from you tube and you’ve got 50 million organic nonforced views
Hi Ash
I am really impressed with the numbers mentioned above. Nice work.
How do you produce so many videos? Do you have an army of freelancers all over the world?
Thanks Georges. We have managed to crack the code and solve the mystery of how to
- scale video content production
- improve quality over time
- not spend crazy amounts of money doing it
- build a business around it.
I’d love to get into the nitty gritty details, but not sure this is the right forum for that…
They really seem to do a terrific job of distributing their content across the internet – you almost can’t avoid stumbling upon and watching one or more of their videos somewhere. One thing though – the UI of their watchmojo/hipmojo sites really needs a redesign (odd blue-ish & orange color palette on a black background, cluttered with links & Google ads, etc.)
Thanks for the kind words, and yes, we are in the process of redesigning and relaunching the “property” which is basically everything under the Mojo Supreme network: WatchMojo.com videos, the blogs, etc.
Expect this in late summer… as there is a lot of stuff under the hood and loads of content in video, text etc.
We have focused on the “Network” but now the time is right to scale the Property.
So you are one step ahead of us…
Pretty impressive, I’ll have to see what their movies are like.
Congrats, Ash! I always knew you would crack the online video nut. Looking forward to more Mojo magic…
Ash, you’re doing a killer job. And kudos on getting the recognition you deserve. It’s no small feat in this economy to keep the momentum moving forward.
Signed,
Your friends at “Mojo South”.
Best,
– Chuck