I keep telling myself not to post monthly updates of WatchMojo’s growth trajectory, and I mean it, but then every once in a while something else happens that blows me away. This is one of those months. I just announced how our offline reach has soared to over 15,000,000 consumers per month (think big screens in malls, gyms, coffee shops etc. broadcasting our content) which combined with our online reach of 5,000,000 uniques put our total reach at 20,000,000 consumers. That is very cool.
But today, I ran our October stats and I was floored, first, the graph, then some perspective, and finally some lessons:
Monthly Streams
All-time Streams
This is freaking insane. When we launched the site in 2006, I used to look at the stats and I would ask myself: do people actually watch videos? And if they do, do they watch anything other than cats falling off skateboards (well, and porn)?
Eventually, we found out that we had to take our videos to where people consumed them. We did 550,000 streams in all of 2006, then did 13,000,000 in 2007. Then 2008 saw a jump to 28,000,000 streams and in 2009 we will do 55,000,000 streams.
We decided to brand the videos heavily to WatchMojo.com, with opening and closing bumpers and lower-third watermark and all. I thought it was crazy, I pushed for it because I figured if people pirated the content (who would want to do that anyway, was my own counter-argument) then at least we would get some branding. But today this means our brand has been seen some 87,000,000 times online alone.
That’s the thing, that is only online. This month I finally decided to run the numbers and see how much presence we had offline. I fell off my chair. Our videos - branded WatchMojo again - are seen in 2,000 retail locations and reach 15,000,000 consumers each month. I will never forget when a would-be investor called me up an hour after we chatted and told me he saw us in a gas station in Los Angeles, or when a former host of ours saw us in a bagel shop in Chicago, or for that matter, when I heard that my former boss curses every time he lands on a site and sees our logo display before a video loads up.
I always laugh when Google scores heavy in InterBrand’s top brand survey because they never set out to build a brand but did so by focusing on the nuts and bolts.
I always thought WatchMojo could become a strong brand (the logo was always intended to stick out). I also thought the company could be big, very big; but the company’s popularity, reach, brand and position in the marketplace is starting to floor myself. And I am a very ambitious and driven individual. I want to make WatchMojo as successful financially as it has been operationally, and I know there’s lots of work to do on that front, but still…
We’ve had to overcome a lot:
- being a content company, which in the 2000s gets no respect from the media and investors alike,
- the 2006 lawsuit which was frivolous and we won, but almost killed us before we really took off,
- talking to VC groups and then seeing them turn around and fund our “competitors”, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, if it weren’t for…
- … seeing those very same companies scale back or shut down, only to leave a bad taste in the mouths of other would-be investors,
- there not being any ad format in online video that is popular, efficient and effective enough to move the needle, the way Google’s text ads did for search, despite the hundreds of millions that hapless VCs have made in the sector,
- being unfunded (forget being underfunded, I mean literally not funded - ever), so always having one foot in the grave and the other foot on the gas pedal,
- the 2008 recession which basically almost killed everything,
- the 2009 advertising market crumbling in H1.
Anyway, I’m not complaining. In fact, I am very grateful.
As we finish Year 3 of WatchMojo’s operations, we have never laid off a single person and technically now have 50% more staff than we did last year (don’t know why I use the word “technically” since we do, in fact, have 50% more staff than last year this time).
Not only am I not complaining, I am counting my lucky stars that we:
- have such a great team,
- have an amazing product,
- provide a valuable service to countless other media companies, both new and traditional,
- are now finally counting amongst our clients marketers such as McDonald’s, Coca Cola, Coors Molson, Malibu Rum and many, many others.
How, on earth, did this all happen?
Well, for one, determination and persistence. I’ve written on that before, here, here is the quote from former President Calvin Coolidge:
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Determination and persistence is just one part of it, you need a lot of luck and timing… and of course, vision, ambition, execution and focus.
I have no idea what the future holds… but I used to think we would get a lot of “street cred” if we jumped off the bridge like many others and raised a boatload of money. The boat never came, the money wasn’t there… and some how we are now totally dominating the industry.
I’ve referred to Sequoia’s “Good Times RIP” presentation and the famous death spiral slide:
I was very concerned about not becoming Company A - you know, the company that didn’t take immediate action and lay off people so that maybe, just maybe, when the dust settled, it could become like Company A, who had the “courage” to lay off everyone and reset its operations.
But, I also didn’t want to be Company B, who recklessly laid off people because it got scared.
Then it hit me, we were neither company A or B, we were a company that was largely off the radar, doing our own thing. We had written our own playbook and were in the process of writing our own history. We were, in fact, Company C:
I don’t quite know who is Company A and Company B in our world, and I don’t care, all I know is that we’re coming on strong. I have always said the beautiful thing about content is that it is not a zero-sum game, our wins won’t necessarily come at the expense of our competitors… but the more we compete in the marketplace, the more often we find ourselves winning.
After publishing 5,000 informative and entertaining videos, we launch our new initiative: WatchMojo Live, straight from Manhattan. Expect a wide array of newsmakers and celebrities in the weeks to come, today, it’s business, new media and technology, with Tech Crunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld.
I’ve done hundreds of taped segments for WatchMojo.com since 2006, but I haven’t done a live show since 2005 when I stopped doing radio to focus on launching WatchMojo.com. Expect some rust…
From the department of “no shit”:
A number of the large ad networks have been reaching out to developers to let them know that they essentially have no idea what’s going on. Facebook has taken the latest actions without giving developers any form of early notification and many ad networks feel left in the dark. Those developers that have ad supported business models (the majority of Facebook developers) feel as though their businesses are in jeopardy. The rationale is that if they can’t trust what were previously reliable ad networks, who can they trust?
The developers all share a legitimate concern. One developer I spoke with postulated that if you can’t rely on the ad networks, is Facebook a good platform for running a business?
I don’t mean to sound holier than thou here, after all, we derive 49.5% of our total streams from YouTube, but YouTube owns 75% of the video content space (ie. so we don’t have a choice). However, to hedge against this, we generate less than 5% of our revenues from YouTube and maybe 10% from Google/YouTube combined.
On the heels of WatchMojo.com crossing the symbolic 75,000,000 all-time streams mark, here are more even stronger growth numbers.
1) What summer effect?
Summer 2008 to Summer 2009: 233% Annual Growth.
A reader asked me about the 200% growth number, so here it is: in fact, we grew 233% if you look at the summer months of June/July/August 2008 to the similar period in 2009:
We’re on pace to cross 50,000,000 streams in 2009. That’s using a simple cross-multiplication formula, if you look at our growth we might do over 55,000,000, even. What will our 2010 figures look like? When 2009 started, I told myself “we should do 100,000,000 throughout 2010″, but if you ask me the same question today, I would say that is a no-brainer.
2) YouTube is the Marketmaker.
YouTube is really starting to own the video content market, in our case, they now account for 49.5% of our total streams. A year ago, they were at 30%.
3) September 2009 was our second best month ever.
What I love about our monthly video stream growth chart is that we keep setting new records, then we come back stronger to break the previous record not within too long.
When we hit 4.2M streams in March 2008, I thought we might never break that, but then in January 2009 I was running December 2008’s stats and realized: “oh, lookie here, we set a new record”. That new record took a whole 9 months to set. These days we set new records fairly quickly, and I do think this can be attributed to Metcalfe’s law.
4) 100 Million Streams by our Four Year Anniversary on January 23 2010 is Possible
As we enter October, we’re on the footsteps of 80,000,000 all-time views, which at our recent volume and growth rates - along with our countless new distribution deals - would suggest that hitting 100,000,000 all-time views by our fourth year anniversary is not impossible.
When I hired our technical advisor from Big Media, I showed him our growth rates and he forecasted that we might hit our 100,000,000th stream by Christmas. At that time, we had just crossed 50,000,000 streams. I told him he was crazy. But with hindsight, I guess this proves one man’s crazy is another man’s common sense.
Read part 1 and part 2 of our interview with Barbara Corcoran, whose namesake company became the top brand in NYC residential real estate. Barbara sold her company and is now busy with her production company as well as with making investments on the ABC show Shark Tank.
WatchMojo: What’s the common trait between all the investments you’ve made?
Barbara Corcoran: Oh, they have many things in common:
#1, each and everyone of them very high energy,
#2, they weren’t all great presenters, but they all had the right answers to the questions,
#3, they totally believe in their idea,
#4, which is harder to get in a TV form like that organized, I kept trying to say my success guide has got one, two, three as he or she organized, because I think you have to be organized or have a second in command to be organized for you if you are going to succeed in business.
WatchMojo: That’s true. Are there any sectors that your investments focus on?
Barbara Corcoran: Yeah. Well, most of the businesses presented on Shark Tank are products, new products. I would say two out of three are new products, and so two out of three of the businesses that I bought were new products. One technology company, one soda company, I guess you can call that a product, but it’s a food good, right? So, they are across the board totally different; one is totally different from another. One is a textile business, so yeah but the great majority of them start out as a single product firm. And so, that’s what most of little businesses are.
WatchMojo: But, one thing that’s interesting and I notice a lot of involves the investors worrying about control. One of the panelists mentioned: “I don’t mind sharing control with you, I just need to be in control”. When I saw the investors trying to wrest away control, I thought maybe they don’t trust themselves, and that is why they can’t trust someone else, because they are expecting the worst to happen; do you agree with that that any…
Barbara Corcoran: No, I don’t. No, I wish I could agree with you, but I don’t at all. When an investor wrestles or holds on to control I respect them, because I’ve been there. It’s your baby, you created it; you burst it, you’ve nurtured it, you know in his toddler year or however old it is, and you trust yourself.
I see it as a compliment to the investor that the, not the investor, the entrepreneur, they totally trust themselves. And, they are not, it’s like a good mom then it is, she is not going to be so quick to toss your baby over to a new babysitter, which you are really doing if you give up majority control. And so, when somebody is hanging on to their kid or their business I respect them for that.
The reason why so often we are in the position on the show of going for majority control or larger shares of the business is because one of the rules of the show is you can’t mess with the money. So, if somebody is coming and asking a 150,000 for a 10%, you can offer them a 60,000 for 10%, if you thought the evaluation was whacked up. You’ve out to meet the money they’ve come in and asked for, so the only piece you can move around is the percentage; does that make sense to you?
WatchMojo: Yeah, that I didn’t know.
Barbara Corcoran: Yeah, I don’t think people will… It’s hard to make it clear, but it would be good if people knew, because I think a lot of people wonder why we are always so greedy trying to take control. The thing is we are just trying to make the numbers make sense you know. Can I tell you the truth. I wish we could play with the money, I think it would jazz up the show.
WatchMojo: When it comes to investing, is your style very hands-on, or are you more hands-off passive investor?
Barbara Corcoran: I am very hands-on building a business, but I don’t have the time to be hands-on. So, I am being particularly choosy about who I pick as a partner. There is a CEO as a firm; they are the ones just going to drive it across the finish line. So, I am paying very careful attention to the attribute of the entrepreneur, the attributes to the entrepreneur.
That’s really the main pick for me, more than the business. Because, you know what I see more entrepreneurs with us, our business sense is not right. But, if they are great entrepreneurs then you’ll have to turn it, twist it and make it right.
WatchMojo: Yeah. That’s why ofetntimes the investors look at the market, if the market is big enough then you could always navigate differently.
Come back tomorrow when we chat about Barbara’s forte: the real estate market.
I had a chance to speak with Barbara Corcoran. If you’re a New Yorker - or even been to NYC - she needs to introduction. Corcoran flipped a $1,000 loan from her boyfriend to create an eponymous $5B organization that became one of the most successful NY real estate brands. She sold her company and now can be seen on ABC’s Shark Tank, helping folks all over the country become familiar with her.
Here is Part 1:
WatchMojo: Why did you decide to sell Corcoran and what have you been doing since the sale?
Barbara Corcoran: I decided to sell it, because I accomplished what I said I have to be. I wanted to be the largest broker in the New York City area, and we accomplished it; that coupled with the fact that I was a very late in life mother having my first child at forty-five. And, my child at that point was probably, my son was probably seven years old, and I felt that between being a mother and being very occupied with running a big business. So, those two combined made the decision an easy one.
WatchMojo: Congrats, I can imagine how that changes everything and…
Barbara Corcoran: Oh my God, without a doubt. And, I have a three-year-old, and believe me I am panting through most of the evenings.
WatchMojo: Since you left the world of real estate directly, have you been first and foremost a mother or have you kept up your entrepreneurial ways and done other?
Barbara Corcoran: No, I went nuts as a mother within a month, as a fulltime mom and I started thinking about what I wanted to do now. And, the thing I came up with is what I liked most about the real estate business building it, which was the media side of the equation.
So, I decided to go into the media business; I didn’t know what form that would take, but I thought I am going to go into the media business. So, the first thing I did was write a book the first year, took me almost a year to write it, which made me realize I am not the best writer.
It’s a great book, good seller, but I realized it’s a lonely business and not up my alley, writing. And then, I went into the TV arena which is much more to my liking.
WatchMojo: You’ve actually done a lot of TV appearances, and obviously the show now. On the researching your background you started a Production Company. Is Shark Tank actually related or is that sort of…?
Barbara Corcoran: Well it’s, no, not at all. I started a Production Company producing real estate for different TV shows, real estate pieces. But, the truth of the matter is that it quickly turned into just being a real estate talent and addressing the marketplace. So, my first job was at Fox News as a political commentator, which was certainly a suit that didn’t fit me. It was the first time in my life I had ever read to New York Times.
I didn’t know, I would like to say, you know that was really on top of politics by any means. But, I learned it on the job, and then I went from there to Good Morning America, then I left Good Morning America went to Today Show, and now of course I’ve added the Shark Tank to it.
WatchMojo: How did Shark Tank come to be, because it’s a fascinating show and I think you add a lot to the show?
Barbara Corcoran: You know it’s a very, very successful show in many places around the world. I think it started in Tokyo, it’s in Taiwan, it’s in Canada; it’s in London and it’s been running for many years. But, I don’t know what the technicality problem was, but they were not able to bring it to the United States.
I don’t know if they couldn’t buy the rights, or what was going on there, but this is the first time they’ve been able to do it US style. And, unlike all the other shows that are called Dragon’s Den around the world, they’ve decided to call it Shark Tank here in the US.
WatchMojo: Why is that; do you think that’s a social thing for this kind of name?
Barbara Corcoran: No. I think it, I happen to agree with it. I understand the logic of it, Mark Burnett was the one who renamed it, wanted to rename it, and I heard his logic on it. And, I am misquoting him, but the jest of it was that he felt that people in America don’t really relate to dragons so well, that’s more of an Asian thing, whereas anybody can relate to being bit by a shark.
WatchMojo: Makes sense. Now, I am not an expert in securities law, but I think part of the problem is the appearance that a contestant is basically offering shares in his company to the public without a prospectus.
Barbara Corcoran: Oh, that makes great sense actually.
WatchMojo: Every successful company has an amazing story; every entrepreneur has an amazing story. Yours is up there definitely: a thousand dollar loan from your boyfriend turns into five billion dollar empire. You sort of have a sense of how, but I just want to like nitty-gritty, how does an entrepreneur actually do that; how do you take a thousand dollars and get it to a big number, forget five billion even a million. So, how did you go about?
Barbara Corcoran: Well, I don’t think I am unlike anyone else; you work your ass off #1, okay? #2, you have to be doing something you really love, and I happen to just step into something I really loved. And third, and maybe not in this order, but it’s just what’s coming to my mind. I think third, I loved the idea of creating something, and so what I created was a business version of the family I grew up in which had ten kids, lot of commotion, lot of mouths to feed.
So, being in a crowd was very comfortable for me, so I was growing the business as quickly as I could from the very first day. If I had an extra commission I would take the commission and hire another sales person, use it for the overhead immediately. And so, we just grew very, very quickly; and I might say I had a lot of help from New York City. Because, just happened to be that 1975, New York City was a terrible place to live. No one liked to come here, and there certainly wasn’t anything or not very many.
There were a handful of coops in the city that were places to live that you could actually buy. And so, I actually rode that wave up as the city converted from a rental town to a sale town. So, my timing, so that’s I guess the fourth one. I had excellent time, hot luck timing.
WatchMojo: The timing is actually up there. You raised the point that you started in 1975. Is there such a thing as an overnight success, or would you say that even the biggest so called overnight success takes a lot of time?
Barbara Corcoran: No, not that I have ever experienced one. It would be nice, no it always came harder and later than I expected.
Read Part 2, where we chat about entrepreneurship, good and bad students as well as the unique challenges and opportunities of being a women entrepreneur.
Is the success of a startup positively or negatively correlated to the quantity and quality of its advisors?
Dopplr is headquartered in London but owned and operated by Dopplr Ltd. in Helsinki, Finland. The service is based on the idea of “intention broadcasting” where you publish your intention to visit somewhere in the future, thus making happy coincidences in your social network less and less coincidental (and thus happier, more efficient). Where or from whom the original idea came from is lost in the mists of time (perhaps someone can enlighten us in the comments?).
Anyway, the purchase price is said to be between €10 million and €15 million. We first covered Dopplr in 2007 when it closed on seed funding.
Supposedly it has raised just €1.25 million or so in total funding although exact figures were never announced, even though they assembled a stellar groups of backers who have much deeper pockets than that.
Get a load of this: Martin Varsavsky (FON), Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Saul Klein (TAG), Esther Dyson (Angel), Tyler Brûlé (Meeja), Thomas Glocer (Thomson Reuters) and Lars Hinrichs (Xing). I mean, good grief, most startups would kill and maim to have that kind of board. As good as this purported exit is, clearly these people thought Dopplr would go way, way bigger than a €15m exit.
Read more. Obviously, I think it’s great to have advisors (and angel investors) but sometimes:
- to win those people over you have to agree to things you might not really agree to.
- you end up getting this false sense of hope that these folks will actually help, when more often than not, what you get is great advice, of which 10% is relevant to you or practical.
- realistically, if you need the cash, angels are great… but if you don’t need the cash, raising money from angels is almost harder and more frustrating.
Let me give you a personal anecdote:
I have a number of great informal/unofficial advisors. What I lack however are a lot of media-centric advisors.
There are a few existing media executives that I chat to, some of whom are clients, suppliers, competitors in fact. But when it comes to the traditional angel/advisor role, most of the people I count on as advisors are either general businesspeople, technology guys or entrepreneurs in other fields.
I’ve always wondered why media angels or advisors have proven elusive and I think I know why.
Media-savvy angels (former executives of big media companies basically) have seen first hand what technology did to traditional media, so they are now more apt to invest (be it time or money) in tech startups, and not content, even though we are disrupting traditional media even more profoundly than tech startups are (in some ways).
So despite the fact that we ourselves are a disruptor as a new media company, a lot of the media advisors I would love to have on board retain fairly entrenched mentalities as “old media types” and are drawn to tech plays, which is fine and a motif in my life as the founder of WatchMojo.com.
Dopplr was a social networking site focused on travel. To see how we disrupt the media pillars through video content, check our travel channel here.
This month, we crossed 75,000,000 all-time streams, so I decided to do a considerable audit and analysis of WatchMojo.com’s content and distribution. This might explain why my blogging has been a bit less frequent, by the way.
Is Openness Really a Good Thing?
I am thinking of posting the full report, which gives an amazing insight into our business and the video industry as a whole, but I am not sure, because there are a lot of trade secrets and competitive intelligence in there that is worth a lot to our competitors. This touches on a key motif online, which is openness and transparency; two things that set us apart from traditional businesses and executives who are generally more reserved.
Normal Distribution and Diversification
By virtue of publishing 5,000 videos spanning a wide array of content across hundreds of destinations and multiple platforms, WatchMojo.com has become a bellwhether or barometer for the video content space, specifically because our library and distribution is so diverse.
Not All Investors Are The Same
Interestingly, while mutual fund managers adhere to the mantra of diversification, most VCs don’t. VCs aim for the fences, which explains why they strike out so much.
Fittingly, today I came across a couple of articles on GigaOm: one is on new media business models, the other on diversification’s pros and cons.
The first was written by Josh Auerbach, who is a senior vice president at betaworks, a media company focused on the real-time web and social distribution of content. He published a post called New Media Demands a New Kind of Media Company, in which he touches on many points:
- new media companies have a different set of challenges and opportunities than traditional media (which is admittedly an obvious statement to make).
- that in new media, you don’t need to own 100% of a unit or project you get involved in, and a by-product of this is collaboration between companies.
- but the one theme that caught my attention was the content creation vs. distribution motif, because now that WatchMojo.com does over 5M streams each month and reaches 20M consumers in the out of home digital market, I realize we have a nice opportunity in the distribution space, as well.
A related post that he links to on diversification, economies of scope is linked to here, written by Sutter Hill Ventures Managing Director and venture capitalist Mike Speiser. They’re both good reads.
I appreciate Speiser’s arguments, that when you diversify you cannot attain the positive abnormal returns, but I respectfully think that explains why we have done so much on so little capital whereas every other venture funded content company will have challenges generating the kind of return VCs usually look for.
Kazaa/Skype/Joost - and I guess Joltid - founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are richer than God. Let’s get that out of the way.
Kazaa was a disruptive and destructive force in music that took the baton from Napster after the RIAA killed the popular file sharing software. But Kazaa’s fate was no different than Napster’s.
Skype, on the other hand, was not only disruptive but also wildly profitable. The duo cashed out admirably in a sale to eBay. It turned out, of course, that eBay bought everything but the underlying technology.
Joost was a disaster from Day 1, and as one of WatchMojo.com’s distribution partners, that was clear from Day 1. We try to tell them all of the things they were doing wrong, to no avail.
Regardless, even if every other project they touch fails, they have made their mark - and earned their fortunes - with the sale of Skype. However, I wonder if this has made them lose their senses.
In fact, I think that it’s a good thing that they two seem to have begun to focus on investments through their Atomico Investments, because I think they are damaging their own reputation as entrepreneurs and businessmen with the way they have handled everything since the sale of Skype.
For one, selling eBay the company without the technology is just bad form, even if the clueless Meg Whitman didn’t see a problem with this. I understand Friis and Zennstrom planned to use the underlying Joltid peer-to-peer Global Index technology for subsequent projects, including Joost, but it is simply bad form. What they should have done is worthy of a separate article.
However, the fact that they are now suing former Joost CEO and Chairman Mike Volpi is also bad form, because I don’t think that they will be able to recruit as many would-be CEOs in the future. By the looks of it, if what they allege is true, Mr. Volpi has also acted questionably, but at some point, you cut your losses and walk away.
As an entrepreneur, I inquired with Atomico way back in the day (full disclaimer: Atomico since invested in DECA, another content producer, though in no way really competitive with WatchMojo.com), but seeing how they have gone about this eBay/Volpi mess… you have to ask yourself, if you are an entrepreneur, does this saga make you more or less interesting to partner with them?
If they are now investors, the answer to that question should trouble them.
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