If you noticed the light blogging this week, it’s because end of month usually is hectic and this week in particular I’ve had a lot more meetings than usual. Don’t ask.
Anyway, in various meetings, a couple of themes came up while I was chatting with a wide number of industry observants and participants, they are:
- Hearing about two of Metacafe’s three founders leaving and cashing their shares (coverage here, here and here), there’s a lot of cynicism from a lot of folks about any of the YouTube contestants ever exiting. I am not sure I agree with that 100%, but I agree that while the race for #3 is on, it’s very hard to position one of them for a sale, and IPOs are out of the question for some time to come. So how do investors get their money back? I don’t know. The distribution/aggregation space is as commoditized as the CDN or CMS one, frankly.
- Some very well-known and very well-funded companies are lacking street credibility largely because they have changed strategies and course so many times that they’ve become the butt end of jokes. I won’t name anyone here, but you can judge for yourself. Feel free to comment in the comments’ section. Oh, one more thing, some of the investors backing these firms are also starting to draw snickers…
I think this highlights some of the challenges you will see more and more in the video landscape and why you are seeing seismic changes in how investors look at investing in video.
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