GoFish, a digital media company that focuses on content geared towards children, teenagers, and their parents, has raised a $22.5 million funding round led by Panorama Capital, Rustic Canyon Partners, and Rembrandt Venture Partners. As part of the deal, Michael Jung, Mark Menell, and Richard Ling (from Panorama, Rustic Canyon, and Rembrandt respectively) will join the company’s board of directors.
The company says that it now has a reach of 69 million unique vistors worldwide, with nearly a third of that coming from the United States. Included in GoFish’s publisher network are sites like WeeWorld, MiniClip, and Piczo (you can see a full list here). To get a sampling of some of the videos available, you can conduct a search at the company’s consumer facing site.
The company plans to use the money to continue growth and expansion, as well as to settle its debt (details below):
In another move to strengthen the anti-YouTube coalition, Viacom is syndicating its videos (from Comedy Central, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and Atom Films, among other properties) to a whole new slew of video-sharing Websites. The new recipients of Viacom’s video love are Dailymotion, Veoh (which already has Hulu and CBS videos), imeem, GoFish, and MeeVee. They join AOL, Bebo, Joost, MSN, and Comcast’s Fancast in gaining access to Viacom’s video library.
Viacom obviously wants to strengthen the hand of other video Websites against Youtube by spreading its videos everywhere except on YouTube. Viacom has a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement and yanked its videos from the site last year. As Comedy Central’s own Jon Stewart said last night regarding his parent company’s lawsuit against YouTube, “A billion dollars? What are they four-year olds?”
I’ve embedded the clip below (which is mostly about the Hollywood writer’s strike) from The Daily Show’s Website. The comment is about four minutes in:
Amidst a falling share price GoFish has dropped its $30 million stock trade for Bolt.com. The deal was also meant to help Bolt pay its settlement with several music labels, including Universal Music.
GoFish had initially celebrated the acquisition in their April 10KSB report as increasing distribution for their “made for internet” (MFI) video shows. The combined sites were expected to draw 7 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. and roughly 14 million globally (according to Comscore Media Metrix).
The deal was expected to close in May 2007. The stalling deal was most likely responsible for the precipitous drop in their share price in June. The drop saw the company’s market cap shrink from $134 million to about $15 million. The acquisition eventually fell through due to alleged licensing concerns.
GoFish has also experienced other problems. Sources close to the company have reported a major ad network stopped serving ads on the site last month due to the low volume of monetizeable traffic. Over two months, the network saw their total ad spending drop to $20 a day at a $1 cpm. This infers 20,000 unique visitors per day seeing advertisements on GoFish.com. The lack of advertising inventory on the front page was cited as a possible reason for the low numbers.
YouTube is clearly the most popular video sharing site on the web. But limits on video length, DMCA takedown notices and billion dollar lawsuits have damaged YouTube’s ability to facilitate serious copyright infringement. The smaller guys are now stepping in to fill the void.
Full length copies of well known TV shows and/or movies are readily available on a number of YouTube competitors. Watch, for example, The Office on DailyMotion, Scrubs on GoFish, or SouthPark on Veoh (update: GoFish and Veoh have apparently removed the shows I linked to).
And if searching for the shows on these sites is just too much work, there are other sites that aggregate and organize this content, and embed it on their own sites. Watch any episode from any of the 11 seasons of SouthPark on Allsp.com. And new site VideoHybrid is in a class of its own, with dozens of full length movies and virtually every popular TV show. VideoHybrid even gives statistics showing exactly how many times copyrights have been violated.
Its not clear if the MPAA and networks just aren’t focusing on these smaller video sharing sites yet, or if DMCA notices are simply being ignored. These sites aren’t hiding out and trying to evade the law – they’re funded by well known venture capitalists and, in Veoh’s case, copyright holders. And GoFish is actually a public company.
Video sharing site Bolt.com is being acquired by GoFish – a smaller but richer rival, in order to pay the settlement the company has agreed to with Universal Music Group for copyright infringement. The New York Times broke the story tonight. Bolt will go for an estimated $30 million in GoFish stock (update: forms filed Monday indicate that the acquisition was for about half this amount) ; the three year old GoFish was the first video sharing site to go public last October. Though it has just begun to bring in revenue from licensing deals, GoFish stock closed Friday just under $6 per share with a market value of $134 million.
The settlement was for “several millions of dollars” in cash, stock and advertising credits – presumably much less than the original demand from Universal of $150,000 per infraction.
The acquiring company GoFish, not to be confused with the wildly successful singles’ site PlentyofFish, has recently seen a huge spike in traffic. It was at 1.4 million monthly unique visitors as of December but reports more than 6 million uniques last month. Bolt sees more than 5 million unique visitors monthly (according to Comscore) and turned that traffic into $7 million in revenue last year. GoFish has reported no revenue but has deeper pockets. It was given birth to by Palo Alto investment firm Global Asset Capital.
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