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YouTube Receives $3.5M Funding from Sequoia
An anonymous reader writes "YouTube, the self-described "Flickr of video" has now received $3.5M in funding from Sequoia Capital, the same VC firm that funded Yahoo!, Google, and PayPal. Competitors of YouTube include Revver, launched just last month and founded by Ian Clarke of The Freenet Project fame. As of now, both services are free. With the online video space heating up in recent months, the question is who will discover the best business model." YouTube was first mentioned on Slashdot shortly after its launch three months ago.
So, what's the difference between this and Google Video? ;)
Or should I RTFA?
And who else have they funded...? Surely there are a couple of other companies, or are they simply very good at picking future winners on the largest scale possible?
I am a leaf on the wind
Vobbo is better! More file formats, but you can use your own domain, make rss feeds for any search term, and embed videos in other annoying trendy sites :)
My Video Blog!
YouTube
Flickr
Sequia Capital
VC
Yahoo
Google
PayPal
Revver
The only ones I know are Google, PayPal and Yahoo what are the other ones? Anyone care to explain?
Is it just me, or is there anyone else who is confused. Without knowing what those products/brands are it is impossible to understand the post.
No editing skills required. "Point, click, smile".
Thanks for the mention!
Video for Online Dating Profiles
Their business model is obviously to be acquired by Yahoo!, Google, or Microsoft.
/ You seem to try to fund your project. \ /
| Mmh, it seems that your project doesn't |
| give any money! Fuck off and ask those |
\ hippie money spoiling firms!
\ ____
\ / __ \
\ O| |O|
|| | |
|| | |
|| |
|___/
Why can't flickr be the flickr of video?
A large part of succeeding in this space will be about technology - there are storage and bandwidth issues aplenty. But if your users need to find someone who thinks prancing around the room with their polka-dot boxers on their head is funny or artistic or... original, they'll need community. And flickr has succeeded in building a community around images, where many others have failed. It's no small feat.
- Hubbah
This is an offtopic, but.. I really dont know.
It seems that lots of money, since Venture Capital is high risk capital, but at the same time, high return of invesmet, if the bussines model takes off..
So far, as a stakeholder, shouldnt Ive concerned about having the same VC at 2 competing brands: Take Yahoo and Google.
With money being a very powerfull weapon for corporative control, should Sequoia cannot be using inside information and just plain playing with the market?
Is this ethical? Doesnt this presents a confict of interests?
How does a VC works, so this doenst happens?
Arent VC regulated?
Â_Â
if those names were used in the same paragraph as $3.5M, you'd swear it was a money laundering operation.
Atari, Rackspace, Cisco, CafePress, PayPal, etc.
They've funded a few winners over the years...
Flickr is pictures with tagging.
Revver I've never heard of, but I'm not really into online video yet.
VC = Venture Capital = money to do stuff with
a irdiving
Sequia Capital = Company that gives out VC if you beg enough
Flikr = Photo sharing site that allows you to tag pictures in your gallery according to their content - this makes them easily searchable -
Yahoo: Yahoo bought Flikr a while ago
YouTube = video version of Flikr, UL your vids & tag them
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos.php?user=ch
Revver = same thing as YouTube
http://www.revver.com/video/2367/
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I *hate* software that's not called "My whatever".
They have just craploads of... Crap!
Surely this is the business model of the future!
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
Site is working normally now, but I figured some of the
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Without knowing what those products/brands are it is impossible to understand the post.
You might consider the possibility that if the post doesn't make any sense to you, it probably isn't something you're interested in.
For instance, if you don't know that VC stands for "venture capital", you probably don't care when some company you've never heard of receives it. And if you've never heard of Flickr (living under a rock, perhaps?), you probably don't care about companies claiming to be just like them.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Eh, I think Kleiner, Perkins is probably a little more of a "household name" than Seqoia but whatever.
Thank you. I am sick of people's sense of entitlement on this site that every article has to apply to them. If it doesn't or if they don't understand, they throw a fit.
Judging from the context, I believe VC is an abbreviation of "Venture Capital", which seems to be the nature of Sequoia Capital...
Here at YouTube, we get a lot of satisfied customers, and some of them ask us how we stay in business and give away free bandwidth.
The answer is simple, volume.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
..The Illuminati! (laugh all you like... history will prove me right.)
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=youtube.com
That's impressive growth.
Here using Gentoo Linux distros, I manage to view this site as the most Linux-friendly, easy to categorize than most other video sites.
One that caught my attention is the ability to teach oneself in how to dance. Now that is something...
Glow Girl seems to have it licked doing what I thought was a pretty good rave dance...
flickr of (adj)
Generally used to indicate your company/business/idea is cool and ahead of the curve, yet you have no clue why anyone would use it, or how to differentiate it from the ten other Flicker-of's.
Examples:
if you want to create your own Flickr of video, you should try LULOP2 open source. Here is a list of available features. Deveforum here. LULOP2 is the software that powers LULOP.com. So, not just Flickr of video, but a professional-grade platform for online video asset management which can be bent to many purposes.
Since when were bad videos the new wave of the future (check them out for yourselves)? Without an incredibly large submission base and moderation (some videos are nothing more than people on camera doing nothing), YouTube's current business model can never survive. If Slashdot cannot get it right (how many dupes can you count a month?), what makes Sequoia think YouTube will? Unlike Slashdot, YouTube is video content, which is many cases is more difficult to submit than text (capturing, authoring, bandwidth, copyrights, etc). It will be interesting to see if YouTube lives up. Personally, I believe Google Video will fare much better.
I guess you are right, this article doesn't apply to me. I was just wondering how many other Slashdotters got confused under the barrage of acronyms/company/brand names. Well, I'll crawl back under my rock now...
Great, Now I can quickly and easily locate videos of dumb, spoiled kids yelling at their video games (front page).
I heard that the VC community is having a hard time finding something of value to invest in (and hence have hundreds of millions of dollars in uninvested funds), but come on, this site is simply a repository (suppository) of internet junk.
iTube.
Techcrunch is way ahead of us on this Flickr-of meme:
o f-video/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/11/06/the-flickrs-
I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
Revver actually tries to give money back to video creators by giving them a 50:50 cut of the advertising revenue, YouTube doesn't do anything like that, in fact, none of the "Flickr of Video" sites do, Flickr doesn't even do it.
This is very important, particularly if you consider the growing frustration of video creators as these websites make money from their creativity without rewarding them (see http://ebaumsworldsucks.com for a good example of this frustration).
Hey I've seen something like this before at picsFolio.com, but it's more for your video blog versus just a video posting site. They do have a pretty decent video directory setup though, and it makes it easy to add videos to your blog or even share them online.. Pretty similar if you ask me..
http://www.picsfolio.com/
Call me a troll, but WTF is insightful in parent???
I put my photos up on the web, and give each one a description. For instance:
http://www.dedasys.com/photos/padova_inverno/
and you know what? People can find them just fine with google or google image search. And I get the adsense revenue myself. It's not much - maybe enough for a pizza for my wife and I every now and then, but hey, I'm not complaining.
So... what's so "fantastc abot Flickr"? Sure, it's nice for those who don't have their own web hosting space... I'm not trying to say it's bad, but I don't get the hype.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Trepia - the 'iChat on crack' geograpically-based instant messenger - was co-started by the same guy as YouTube.
Trepia never really got going. Partly due to a small userbase (compared with every other IM), windows-only client (it *just* worked under WINE), and pretty poor location detection (you had to tell it where you are).
Looks like Meetro are taking over that spot, although I note they don't have non-windows clients either.
I find myself going to Google or Wikipedia frequently to decipher the alphabet soup I find here. I guess that's the price I pay for cruising geekdom.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
When Adcritic, which has similar growth to Youtube, went under the popular conclusion was that the cost of bandwidth was too high and that nowadays with cheaper bandwidth, this business model works. Adcritic had videos of ads - the argument was that they wouldnt get sued cos advertisers are happy if people watch ads. But they did - cos the middle men who arrange royalty payments to actors in ads felt threatened and put a spanner in the works. When an ad is being aired all the royalty payments are sorted, but if you show it months later then unless you can arrange a byzantine web of payments yourself (which is not viable for Youtube) you are as vulnerable as adcritic, no matter how cheap your 2005 bandwidth. Much of Youtube's content is user generated, but most of this is crap, the most viewed items are non user generated clips that Youtube does not have the rights for and some of these are memes like the matric ping pong clip that have been doing the rounds of the web for years. The answer to whether Youtube's impressive growth is sustainable, will depend not on whether they have volume, as they say, but whether the volume contains anything othr than a vacuum. That will depend on whether new memes and quality content are supplied by cellphone captured video. The jury is still out on that one.
The big problem with all of these video sites, which you don't seem to see with the photo ones, is that all they ever do is steal videos from each other and slap their own website url on the video. ebaumsworld, big-boys, collegehumor, etc etc.. I can't remember the others, but there's TONS. Now there's google video and these other guys. I've seen a mass amount of copyrighted video being hosted by all of them also. ebaumsworld and somethingawful had a forum invasion war just this last month because ebaums took tons of the photoshop phriday contest content and put it up on their own site after slapping their name on it. How many more of these sites do we need? Bandwidth is cheap.. I get it already.
Troll.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
Great! More useless web content. I am going to waist a couple of hours of my time at work watching someone elses crap on the internet.
Spectacular idea!
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Vimeo (a side project from the minds behind collegehumor.com etc) is another video sharing site that often gets mentioned amongst these sites. Most recently it was mentioned in the nytimes article about the same subject. I've had really amusing experiences with the software, both in it's ease of sharing videos and discovering others. Flickr integration too! You can't argue with that.
Watching these things are still a monumental waste of time.
Wait until YouBoob launches! It won't raise any VC, but it will make a lot more money.
liquidation prefs aren't debt - they are tied to the seniority and status of the preferred shares. unlike debt, in a subsequent round liquidation preferences can be wiped out completely. the same cannot happen with a lease line or a loan from the bank. if the company doesn't pay back the loan the bank can take a lien on the IP and other assets of the company. the same does not apply with liquidation prefs.
Preferred shares (as referenced in the above post) are ABSOLUTELY not debt.
there are other legal issues with debt as opposed to equity in terms of liabilities, control, etc. VCs invest to get control. another reason that the above post is an incorrect statement is that the limited partners of VCs (the institutions that give money to VCs) specify that the capital is to be used to purchase equity, and a very small amount may be specified to be debt. they do not want VCs to be banks.
some firms may use a convertible note but the intention is that it eventually gets converted into equity in a financing round or an exit.
as a corollary, you can see that there have been specialized "VC debt funds" which are not real VC funds. These funds do not take equity or control, but instead provide debt to a company (and not in the form of preferred shares). the existence of these is predicated on the fact that VC firms do NOT provide debt.
i'm a vc and i've been on the other side of a term sheet three times. the above poster is both rude and informed (the worst combination).