VentureBeat

Taboola, a Tel Aviv-based video discovery startup, has just launched its “ViDiscovery” product, which analyzes the context and content of videos, and the viewing and behavior patterns of users in order to recommend videos. It has also secured $4.5 million in a second round of funding. The company aims to make money by running targeted ads with relevant videos.

Viewers watching a Sarah Palin interview on CNN, for example, will see a gray pop-up tab that suggests similar videos and “People who watched this also watched” recommendations. Is it compelling? You betcha.

Taboola has also landed a deal with CNN to embed their recommendation tab in its video player, as NewTeeVee reported, joining the ranks of sites such as aniBoom, 5Min and Sclipo that do the same. Other companies working on video discovery engines include Vodpod and Mesmo, although they’re concentrating on services that are more directed towards consumers.

The investment was led by Evergreen Venture Partners (who backed the previous round) and American and Israeli angel investors. Launched in 2007, Taboola has raised $6 million to date.

San Francisco-based VodPod is another also-ran online video site that’s growing.

Vodpod lets you collect videos from around the web and organize them on your own VodPod page, then share them with others. Typically, a user will pick a theme for their collection, or “pod,” such as the Turkish music video pod example shown at bottom.

The most interesting part: You can then embed your video pod on a separate site. The NewTeeVee blog has a good example.

Vodpod traffic — from both its home site and from embedded collections — is near a million visitors a month; registered users number over 50,000. This growth, says company founder Mark Hall, suggests there’s too much hand-wringing about there being ‘too many video sites.’”

The growth appears to reflect what YouTube is also experiencing: The more users create collections, the more people sign up after checking out those collections, and so the virtuous cycle hopefully continues until the market is saturated.

Still, Vodpod’s traffic is tiny in comparison to YouTube and some other sites. Stiff, increasing competition is driving other video sites to adapt their businesses. Even healthy levels of traffic don’t guarantee decent revenue. Sony’s Grouper/Crackle online video-sharing site, for example, is moving from video sharing toward a new model: It wants to be a studio for talented new actors, animators, etc. (coverage here). Crackle wasn’t making money, even though its traffic was growing. So its goal is to make video hits — and then to distribute them through Sony, making money that way.

VodPod started last fall with the bet that the online-video market was still wide open, and that they have a better tool for collecting and sharing videos. San Francisco’s True Ventures invested an undisclosed amount in June. (True also invested in NewTeeVee’s parent, GigaOm, so there’s a sort of cross fertilization here.)