Irony of ironies: Bolt.com, a site that started off as a content producer, got YouTube envy, became a file sharing site, finally shut down when GoFish changed its mind on buying the troubled company (GoFish is a syndication partner of WatchMojo.com).
This one is odd… I was talking to some colleagues today, telling them how it was in our interest to see all of the leading video destination websites succeed: YouTube, Revver, Veoh, GoFish, Joost, etc. We partner with them, so their growth and health translates to our health and grow. But I do think that you will see a fallout and many more cases like Bolt.com, and when that happens, it won’t be due to company mismanagement but rather, the background of how most of these file sharing sites came to be. continue reading...
[Disclaimer: Veoh is one of the companies we partner with on the distribution of our video archive. We just signed the deal, have yet to ramp up… but thought I should mention that.]
When Veoh raised $40M from a cornucopia of investors including Goldman Sachs, an investment banker acquaintance of mine asked what it could possibly do with all that money. I stressed that YouTube, despite all of their traffic, only generated some $15M in revenues in all of 2006, even though their inventory merited them making $7.5M per month… alas, I also stressed that the costs of hosting videos adds up quickly as you scale. That’s one negative of scaling in the video content business, I presume. continue reading...
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