How do you scale something that decreases in value with every new customer it acquires? You can only pump so many fake video promotions into a market before it's completely saturated and people start to resent the constant assault of your ads. Not to mention the fact that every Tom, Dick and Jane with a camera is already pushing their own videos every chance they get.<p>Then there's this:<p>> “All [Jimmy Kimmel] had done was expose [the Double Rainbow] video to a couple hundred million people who would find this video interesting to them,” Debelov says. (Actually, [Kimmel] tweeted it to his 90,000 Twitter followers). “We’ve taken that process, and reversed engineered it. We can’t guarantee your video will go viral because it all depends on your content, but we can get it in front of a million, two million, half a million, whatever your budget is – we can get you in front of that audience.”<p>You've reverse engineered the power of celebrity? Highly doubtful. When a comedian with the clout of Jimmy Kimmel calls something the "funniest video in the world"[1], his fans are going to watch that video. When those same people see a video advertisement at the bottom of a blog post or in one of their mobile apps, they're going to ignore it. Hell, even celebrity has its limits -- Kimmel's suggestions would be ignored if he started posting random videos rather than specific links of his own choosing.<p>Anyone born after 1980 has been conditioned since adolescence to ignore online advertisements. It's gotten to the point where you have two choices: 1.) Make your ad so obtrusive that it might actually cost you users, or 2.) Don't infuriate your users, and settle for a CTR of .01% on a good day. I can only see this service reinforcing that conditioning.<p>[1] <a href="http://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/17665533038" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/17665533038</a>
Noticed some pretty bad complaints from customers on Techcrunch seemingly alleging click (or in this case play) fraud. Do you have anything yet in place to prevent play-fraud?<p>"Tried running some videos with Virool. Couple of things I didn't expect:<p>1. Even with very precise targeting, my entire $100 ad budget was eaten up right away. We're talking seconds - minutes.<p>2. I was charged for views after just a few seconds of starting the campaign, even though the video is several minutes long. Clearly they are not restricting charging to actual completed views. "
Virality used to be a mark of excellence for a video, some way of measuring success. Now that success is no longer a symptom but the actual goal the nature of videos and their promotion will change.<p>Just like email could be used to reach large numbers of people in a short time, spam attempted to destroy it.<p>Eventually this will devolve into 'video spam' where you'll be bombarded with links to videos in the hope that they will go viral. Fortunately the cost of producing any video is so large that this will dampen the flood but if there are companies that aim specifically for virality of content then that is a sure sign that we're about to see a shift.<p>Eventually viral videos will die out because too many impulses deaden the nerve and then another useful and nice to have thing will have been murdered. Virality is the mark of excellence of a successful meme, something that should work its own way because you showed it to <i>a small number of people</i> and they decided to reward your work with a reference and so on. Forcing virality by dumping a video in front of a large number of people will simulate the effects of virality by using a starting group large enough that the eventual effect will be indistinguishable from virality.<p>But it is not the same as virality. A viral campaign costs outside of the original production costs next to nothing and is proof you got it right. If you have to force virality you are actually saying that your video is not all that good.<p>So users of services like these should realize that they are essentially admitting their content is not the real thing.
It doesn't seem like the service involves virality at all, they just provide an affiliate network to serve videos on for a fee. Like a video version of AdSense. Am I missing something?
Naive question: Is there a technical definition that differentiates a Seed round from Series A?<p>I used to think<p>- Seed round was raised from friends and family - but this one has tonnes of institutional investors.<p>- Seed rounds typically raise <1mm at <10mm valuation - but this one raised 6mm+ (at maybe 50-60mm valuation?)<p>- Seed rounds happen before the business is well defined - also not true in this case.<p>So why is this called a seed round and not a Series A?
I am really sick of people talking about the multitrillion markets they want to conquer.
So many startups calling that card.It's ridiculous!
"We will be successful because it is a 1000 trillion market".How about being realistic.It's just stupid.We all know nobody will get even close to a damn trillion.<p>I would rather divide 7 mil.$ between 10 good startups instead of 1 like this.
We have a company that enables your videos to go viral ... that don't have their own video that has gone viral to show their company to the world, but instead we learn from techcrunch.
It's a nice forced viewing platform making zynga and others very happy ;) view vid for 30sec and get some credits for FarmVille, exactly he audience everyone wants to reach. Typical non viral approach just Deliver numbers for reports ;) but big respect to the guys how they packaged it shiny and positioned it within the whole ecosystem. As filling out surveys or subscribing to newsletters or services like netflix in exchange for credits the user do not like any more...
"He kept fielding from clients at the time was “can you help me make these videos go viral?” "No... but..."<p>In search marketing, the question is "Can we get to top of Google?"<p>And the answer can be yes if the client is willing to go pay-for-play (AdWords).<p>So these guys basically built their own platform to do pay-for-play, I'm assuming.
I am wondering what kind of valuation this company had got. To raise that amount of money I expect at least $12M post-money valuation (and still they have sold about 50% of the company for a seed round).
So, the question is what kind of mind-blowing traction they had?
I wonder if there's a way to hook this with amazon mechanical turk: pay a cent for a person to just open up youtube and watch a video. Then set up a network where people pay money for views, and profit from the spread.