Veoh, the high-quality video sharing site, raises $26M

June 14, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

(Updated with Comscore and Hitwise stats, which show Veoh’s numbers lower than the company states; also updated with a fuller list of investors)

veoh-logo.jpgVeoh, the San Diego video-sharing site backed by former Disney exec Michael Eisner, has raised another $26 million in funding, giving it a massive war-chest exceeding $41 million.

PE Hub has the news.

The video sharing site came out of testing mode in February, and is different from most sites because it uses peer-to-peer technology (a technology that taps the computers of regular users) to distribute DVD-quality video, or better than the standard YouTube video.

However, it is not alone in using such technology. Joost, an IPTV company using P2P, recently raised $45 million in venture backing. And there’s a new player, Babelgum, launched by Fastweb founder Silvio Scaglia with $13.2 million of his own money.

With Veoh, people can upload videos and then can syndicate them to other popular sites including MySpace and YouTube. Joost is also trying to encourage such community activity, offering sharing, chat, IM and even blogging from within a show. Veoh lets producers make money through a revenue share or by charging a fee. Babelgum lags on the social front, and also is behind in pulling in content, and has evident advantage anywhere else, so it is a long-shot at this point.

Veoh says its “user base” is now 12.5 million, up from 4.4 million in February — we’re assuming that’s monthly uniques, but are trying to confirm. (Update: Comscore shows them much lower; see below.)

According to PEHub, Goldman Sachs led the round for Veoh at a rumored $60 to $70 million pre-investment valuation, with Goldman vice president, Pete Perrone, joining the Veoh board. Existing shareholders Spark Capital and Shelter Capital Partners also returned. Time Warner Investments, another previous investor, may also have invested. (Update II: Turns out, other new backers also include former Viacom and MTV Networks Chief Executive Tom Freston’s Firefly3, and Jonathan Dolgen, former Chairman and CEO of Viacom Entertainment Group.  Meanwhile, Michael Eisner’s Tornante Company invested in an earlier round.)

Veoh and Joost have now each raised far more cash than their predecessors did — more than YouTube, MetaCafe and DailyMotion put together, for example.

Update: Here are Comscore stats for worldwide unique visitors (age 15+) for April 2007:

Youtube: 163.2 million
Dailymotion: 25.3 million
Metacafe: 23.2 million
Veoh: 5.5 million
Revver: 945,000

Update II: Here is Hitwise:

veoh.jpg

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  • Vanilla Chin
    Matt - this is because Veoh is probably taking their numbers from their actual logs and both comScore and Hitwise are sample-based.

    Because these services are sample-based, they aren't as accurate as company's own log data.

    This is comparing apples to oranges.
  • Quantcast says Veoh monthly unique visitor numbers are 700,000 ish. That is a very very very long way from 5M. Comscore is a joke.
  • Vanilla, log data is pretty unreliable too. It includes all kinds of junk. bots, spiders -- and besides, no third party has access to this data, so who's to tell.
  • One interesting point is that P2P based video companies are raising more money than the traditional ones - albeit their infrastructure needs are much less. At Joost, I can understand that because they sign deals with big content providers; is this the sign that Veoh also is planning to tap into that?
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  • There used to be a site called UTube.com before the bubble burst. It was the same thing: user uploaded videos. It was shut down and the domain transferred. After 2001, a pipe company bought the domain name. Now, the pipe company is suing YouTube. What kind of IP world have we created?