Is there room for a video-sharing site besides YouTube? Intel Capital, Adobe Systems, and media investor Gordon Crawford are placing their bets on Veoh, which is announcing a $30 million series D financing. Intel Capital is leading the round, and previous investors Shelter Capital, Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Time Warner, Michael Eisner and Jonathan Dolgen also participated. This brings the total Veoh has raised to a whopping $70 million.
Veoh wants to move beyond the PC to mobile devices, and is putting a lot of resources behind developing its behavioral ad targeting platform for video.
The announcement also comes a day after Veoh started blocking access to all but 33 countries (plus U.S. territories) in an attempt to focus on the most lucrative markets (and, no doubt, reign in some costs—video streaming is expensive). The countries being blocked, including many in South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, represent less than 10 percent of Veoh’s audience.
That audience, globally, is growing at a nice clip. The company claims 28 million monthly unique viewers, who on average spend 100 minutes a month on the site. And the avreage length of videos watched on Veoh is 10 minutes.
ComScore counts 18.5 million global unique visitors, as of April, and another 8.7 million who watch on the startup’s P2P software client, VeohTV. If you add the two together (the red and purple lines in the second chart below), it comes to 27.2 million, which is about the same as the total reported by the company. That combined total would put Veoh’s audience right below Metacafe’s (28.9 million) and DailyMotion’s (34.6 million).
And it is growing much faster than either one (538 percent over the past year, versus 70 percent growth for DailyMotion and 50 percent growth for Metacafe).
Of course, Veoh and all of these second-tier video sites still pale by comparison to YouTube, which boasted 300 million unique visitors worldwide in April.
