It’s somewhat fitting that the king of online transactions, Paypal’s Peter Thiel is trying to reinvent the VC game; a game all about transactions.
Thiel is re-examining and might even be reinventing traditional venture capital. Paul Saffo, a tech industry forecaster who has tracked Silicon Valley for the past two decades, said long-standing investors, who once reigned supreme from their Sand Hill Road pedestals, are now getting squeezed by private equity firms on the high end, and wealthy angel investors on the low end of the investing scale. A bleak market for venture-backed initial public offerings has only increased the pressure.
“We will see more changes to the venture-capital model in the next five years than we have seen in the last 25,” Saffo said. “Peter is definitely tweaking the model. He has the luxury and flexibility to play around a bit.”
Entrepreneurs trying their hand at the venture capital game is nothing new, and it can be a winning combination for some. “You certainly pick up a lot of credibility as a venture capitalist if you have been an entrepreneur,” said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association.
So far, the combination is working for The Founders Fund, which raised its first $50 million fund in 2005 and has invested in a dozen companies. Now it is on the verge of raising a second fund in the $120 million to $150 million ballpark. While the first fund focused on raising money from like-minded entrepreneurs and investors, this time Thiel is casting a wider net to lure more institutional investors such as universities and endowments, the bread-and-butter of traditional venture firms.
Read more.
Not trying to be cynical or anything, but I wonder how long it will be until the Founders Fund turns out to be just like the VCs they are trying to displace. If they can stick to their guns, great. I hope that Sean Parker does not forget the sight and feeling of the knife being pulled out of his back. I also hope that Peter Thiel does not forget that his greatest hit came on a gut instinct (his decision to invest in Paypal).
Lord knows that traditional VCs have created the very same threats they face: lack of imagination and lack of tact, frankly. I’m not stupid enough to name names… I am also realistic to know that eventually, I’ll have to go down that path.
My two cents is to founders: hold out as long as you can, get some revenue coming in, reinvest as much as you can in growth, make sure you never run out of money, and then talk to financiers on the right terms. I’m fortunate having sold my share in a company last year. I see that. But others have other means to raise something to start off. A VC need not be the first path.
Sure, you never want to go hit the street looking for financing when you need to… but wasting your time chasing VCs is futile. The only way to work with VCs is for them to come knocking.
For every 1 minute you spend on fundraising, spend five building your business. Sales is the cheapest form of financing. Less headaches too.
When I started the company, I spoke to a couple of VCs. I thought it was the natural thing to do. Those I spoke to thought we were being too ambitious. Mind you, I didn’t speak to too many, but it only took one to turn me off.
As our company has grown 2,500% in one year, a few now reach out to us. Mind you, had I been able to secure financing, our company might be 25,000% larger… but I would also not have been able to chase the deals and opportunities that opened up to us.
I don’t want to paint everyone with the same brush, but the doubters are now believers. What changed?
The business plan? Nope.
The people? Nope.
The fundamentals? Nope.
We simply executed the plan and will continue to do so.
That’s the only way to change VCs. Entrepreneurs who think any differently are delusional and lack the one trait that makes an entrepreneur most successful: determination.
It’s because of this, that I doubt the Founders Fund will really achieve its goal. Before long, they will get lazy and complacent like the very same VCs they are trying to put the kybosh on.
Are Parker, Thiel and company going to be as hungry as the hungriest of entrepreneurs to chase down every deal, talk to every entrepreneur and get the deal done on the right terms. In theory, sure. In practice, I don’t think so.
In business and in life, you don’t wait for others to make things happen, you make things happen yourself. Then, and only then, will the money follow.
What’s that saying Russell Simmons used some time ago: “The arrogance of white men is why I’m here today. My independence is because they didn’t accept me. So I’ve made more money every step of the way.”
Replace “white men” with VCs and you get a good lesson in business and fundraising right there. Oh, wait a minute…
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WatchMojo NewsletterWe covered Glam’s $18.5M Series C funding earlier today. For that click here.
Some more thoughts:
Venture Beat and ZDNet quoted the most recent Series C Funding to have gone down at a valuation of $150 million.
$150 million? What the…
Forget what all of the doubters are rightfully saying about the 7M unique claim (see that here and here), IF true - and that is a big IF - then it does fall in line with the fact that iVillage (the leading women’s network) exited for $600M and had roughly 15M unique users, according to Nielsen//NetRatings or comScore Media Metrix (more on this below).
Obviously the 7M unique claim is from internal logs, but apparently, CEO Samir Arora managed to convince his initial and new backers to pony up.
Note to entrepreneurs, it’s not a bad idea to have more than one VC, because clearly, you can play one against another. I think Samir got one VC to want to pony up money and simply that led the others to add to the fund and raise the value. I do not see any other way for the valuation to have risen so much, for a company that has been around for a year and is not yet profitable.
Is there a way to rationalize the valuation?
Management counts, I guess. Earlier this year, Pop Sugar got $5M from Sequoia. For what it’s worth, Pop Sugar has a talented management team too. We covered that deal here. Arora is no slouch:
Samir Arora has been innovating with technology to create wealth for the last 20 years; He is the Chairman of Information Capital VC fund, Information Capital. Prior to that, Arora was the Chairman of Emode/Tickle, Inc, which was sold to Monster in 2004 and Chairman and CEO of NetObjects, Inc, since its inception in 1995 to 2001
Not bad. Much props. But if the company is doing so well, why the additional $18.5M? The use of funds, apparently, call for
- Small percentage will be used to “get to profitability,”
- Geographic and market expansion,
- Technology and content M & A.
Regardless, it’s a lot of money and a high valuation for what the capital markets could eventually support.
But consider this: we’re comparing apples with oranges admittedly, but if eyeballs matter once again - and clearly they do - then iVillage’s 15M uniques flipped for $600M, and somehow, someway, Glam’s 7M is about half of that, or $300M. Since Glam is not a publicly traded entity, then it could be said that you could apply a 50% liquidity discount, thus:
Valuation: 50% x $300M = $150M valuation.
I know, pretty crazy. I need to call my investment bankers. Oh, right, I don’t have one.
We had a blast going through the footage to do this, we hope you enjoy it.
The Top 10 Viral Videos of 2006 according to WatchMojo.com’s Staff, hosts, and editors.
I am a big believer in content, I am a content guy, but $18.5M financing for a company with 7M unique users is a lot of money. Yet that is how much Women’s Fashion Online Media Company Glam.com Got in Financing from Duff Ackerman & Goodrich Ventures (DAG), with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, WaldenVC, and Information Capital.
I fully understand that the dynamics between the men and women’s markets are very different, but when TheMan landed $17M in financing a few years ago from Highland, I thought it was cooky. Less than a year - and a Time magazine cover - later, TheMan “ceased operations and shut down.
That was a waste of $17M. Now I know the online advertising market is different and Glam is much more advanced, but if they are so large, shouldn’t they be raking advertising revenune in?
Don’t know. $18.5M is a lot of money for a content company. I would pay anything to see the Use of Funds section of the business plan.
Check out the site here.
Update #1: Interesting analysis by the resurgent Valleywag here. And of course, the always spot on PaidContent.org stated that the company’s previous round was to the tune of $11M here.
That is $30M for a company of 7M uniques, according to its log files. No problem there, but my last company, the largest online men’s compacy with 5-10M according to log files sold for $13.5M in all. I once again recognize that women are perhaps more valuable, especially if they are shoppers, but folks, that is a helluva lot of money. Then again, iVillage sold for $600M to NBC Universal, but iVillage Glam ain’t.
Anyone working in online publishing and advertising has known that fashion is about to migrate online. In other words, no, print magazines won’t disappear but the piece of the pie that goes to online is to surge.
Additionally, based on what I am reading and seeing, Glam is more than an advertising play, it’s an eCommerce play, but let’s not get crazy here folks, I have never seen my wife, sister, mother, [insert any other woman I know here] buy clothes online, there is something about shopping for clothes from an actual store. Of course, a quick survey of the female staff here suggests the percentage could be 20% (yes, I know, highly empirical), but for items like lingerie and what not.
The point I am making is that up to now, I felt that we were not in a bubble because valuations for startups or rapidly growing companies were not absurd, this one, my dear, I think just might be.
All to say, it’s officially crazy times in digital media once again.
2006 was another exciting year on the Web. With the world Internet penetration reaching 16%, led by the Chinese, Indian and South American markets, the Web is definitely about to undergo another period of radical change and innovation.
With that in mind, we bring you the top 10 newsworthy storylines of 2006.
Bear in mind that somewhat fittingly, we’re delivering this list in text and video format for your reading and viewing please.
For the text list, do nothing. Just keep reading, to see the video format, click here.
10. SATELLITE RADIO GROUNDED? (see video)
Yes, we know. Terrestrial radio sucks. Mel Karmazin moved from Viacom to Sirius. And yes, Howard Stern followed. But, who cares. Who do you know that actually owns a satellite radio? I don’t. Not when you have Web radio anyway. Web radio is this year’s satellite radio. Last year satellite radio was on such lists. But something went wrong, very wrong.
First off, as bad as plain old radio might be, it didn’t go out of business altogether. In fact, radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc. has a market cap of over $17 billion. That’s approximately double the market cap of Sirius and XM combined. Clear Channel’s stock has outperformed the shares of both satellite radio companies over the last two years by a wide margin.
And the nature of competition changed. Enter Apple, podcasts and even, Nokia. In fact, we think that companies with outdoor assets (Clear Channel for example) can Wifi-enable billboards and beam their signals to listeners and totally redefine the radio market.
The iPod was launched in 2001 and sold 70 million units in five years. Nokia Corporation thinks it will sell 80 million music phones this year. These devices are obviously delivery mechanisms and platforms for whatever radio is, becomes and competes with.
It’s not like people are not excited about radio, it’s just that the excitement has shifted: over the past five years, Apple Computer Inc.’s stock has risen from about $11 to $91.
One thing that keeps their stocks, well, on the ground is the heavy debt burden: XM and Sirius have balance sheets with over $1 billion in debt and they’re losing money to this day in 2006 off quarterly revenues of some $200 million.
Oh, I know what you are thinking, they are building market share, right. Well, let’s examine the tale of the tape:
XM finished the third quarter with more than 7.2 million subscribers. Sirius has more than 5 million subscribers.
More importantly, both companies are reducing targets. That’s weak. Sirius cut its subscriber goal for the year and now say it expects to end 2006 with 5.9 million to 6.1 million subscribers, down from its previous estimate of 6.3 million. XM has cut its subscriber goal at least twice this year. It expects to end the year with 7.7 million to 7.9 million subscribers.
Come on? It’s so weak that some are calling for a merger. Problem. Who buys who?
XM’s enterprise value smaller than Sirius’ even though XM has a larger subscriber base. What does that say? One word: hype. Another word: flash.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Besides, the FCC will probably not allow it, it sold two licenses to XM and Sirius to ensure competition. If it views satellite radio as one entity taking on terrestrial radio and Web radio, then it says a lot about the future of satellite radio, which held so much promise recently.
And… with Democrats in office, we don’t think that a one company market is realistic.
Lastly, the fact is that the companies’ technologies are somewhat different: they use different codecs.
So where does this lead Mel Karmazin? Who knows, Yahoo! maybe? I hear they need a good salesman.
9. VIDEO GAME MARKET ENTERS A NEW PHASE OF COMPETITION (see video)
2006 marked the year that the Consoles Wars entered a whole new phase of competition: Wii vs. Ps3 vs. XBOX 360, with the latter coming out in 2005 and enjoying a one year advantage over the PS3, which missed its spring 2006 release date and had to take on Nintendo’s Wii in November, which at $250 is half the price of the PS3.
What happened? According to market researcher NPD:
In the end: Sony Corp. sold 197,000 PlayStation 3 consoles in the U.S. during November, missing its goal for initial shipments by half after parts shortages slowed production
Nintendo Co.’s Wii, which also was introduced last month, sold 476,000 units.
The Microsoft Corp. Xbox 360, on the market for the past year, sold 511,000 machines.
In November 2006, to pre-empt Sony’s PS3 release, MSFT converted its XBOX 360 into an actual entertainment system. Microsoft’s vice president of entertainment and devices division (which oversees Xbox), Peter Moore, forecasts 13-15 million Xbox 360s by end the end of 2007, considering the news todat that just one year after the November 22, 2005 launch of the XBOX 360, MSFT will be unleashing over 1,000 hours of programming and getting TV content to an audience that has in the past few years avoided television for video gaming, this is an interesting development. We’re talking content from Ultimate Fighting Championship, CBS, Viacom, WB and many others.
While analysts and gamers alike were busy talking about who won and who lost between the three, the mainstream media covered the sheer madness surrounding the release, reiterating once again that the video game industry deserves its place at the main table.
Video games will never be the same.
8. VERTICAL: CONTEXT IS KING (see video)
As the leaders galvanize their positions and the Web becomes more mature in general, it’s only normal that there is a movement to develop and aggregate content along vertical, niche or contextual lines. Recently, Spencer Wang, Bear Stearns Entertainment & Cable/Satellite TV Analyst unveiled a report called Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment highlighted these trends quite well.
This is really not all that different than ABC, NBC and CBS making room for the cable stations as TV evolved.
Call it deportalization, call it maturing, whatever you call it, we expect this trend to accelerate in next year as even the major portals launch vertical niche properties.
7. NET NEUTRALITY (see video)
In 2006 a controversy erupted in the United States regarding the extent to which network neutrality should apply to the regulation of the Internet. The companies that provide the backbone on the Web sought to offer end users a better quality of service for their own service offerings or to services who pay the providers. However, five attempts by supporters to get bills with network neutrality provisions passed by Congress were defeated.
What’s the definition? Taken literally from Wikipedia:
Network neutrality is a general principle of Internet carrier regulation requiring networks to satisfy all application needs equally. For example, a perfectly neutral network would not give better service to some web sites than others, and it is argued that it would likewise not favor web-surfing or blogging over online gaming or Voice over IP.
Tim Berners-Lee defines it so as to allow connection to the Internet at various service levels and defines it as: “If I pay to connect to the net with a given quality of service, and you pay to connect to the net with the same or higher quality of service, then you and I can communicate across the net, with that quality of service.”We are not sure if this will ever pass, especially now that companies like Google – who oppose the bill – have established lobbyists on Capitol Hill.
6. OLD MEDIA MALAISE (see video)
We’re not usually ones to cast old media as the troubled folk that some other new media sources do. Traditional networks, newspaper, radio magazines are powerhouses with strong balance sheet and stronger income statements.
But there has been a sense this year that so-called old media views the web as an integral and important part of their business.
This has been highlighted by management shuffle with musical chairs at:
- Time Warner AOL fired Jon Miller and replaced him with NBC ad exec Randy Falco.
- CBS Digital brought in M&A dealmaker Quincy Smith
- News Corp.’s FIM’s CEO Ross Levinsohn resigns and is replaced by cousin Peter.
- Viacom gets rid of Tom Freston and brings in Philippe Dauman, a lawyer with dealmaking expertise.
Old Media also embraced many open networks to get their content out to the masses.
Viacom struck a deal with Google. YouTube signed a deal with most media companies. Of course, Universal Music Group sued MySpace, but hey, at least they’re talking. Jokes aside, Bit Torrent too signed a deal with the labels.
All small and not so small steps bridging the gap between online and offline.
5. INTERNET GAMBLING TAKES A HIT (see video)
Like porn, gambling is one of those industries that lies beneath the surface, in the underbelly of the Web.
But much like porn, it is one of the most successful and lucrative ones.
When some politicians began to circulate the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act, a lot of people thought it would not pass. The measure was sent to President George W. Bush to sign into law, and sign it he did.
When President Bush, the House of Representatives and Senate passed the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act, they approved a bill that made it illegal for banks and credit-card companies to make payments to online gambling sites, effectively squeezing out an industry from the landscape.
The result: the stock market capitalization of the major gambling companies tumbled by $6.5 billion.
Britain’s PartyGaming Plc, operator of leading Internet poker site PartyPoker.com, and rivals Sportingbet and 888 Plc pulled out of the United States, their biggest source of revenue.
“This development is a significant setback for our company, our shareholders, our players and our industry,” PartyGaming Chief Executive Mitch Garber said.
“We believe that this will have a very material impact on the long-term prospects of online gambling, and in particular poker,” said analyst Julian Easthope at UBS. “This will lead to a rapid decline in the use of online poker sites.”
Whether or not these laws would be reversed or not will have a major, major implication.
One side factor is that we expect Fantasy gaming to pick up the slack in terms of presence and mindshare online, though clearly, for obvious reasons, that is a very different and smaller ballgame.
4. MICROSOFT GETS BACK ITS MOJO (see video)
The launch of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista will generate 100,000 new jobs and $70 billion in revenue to U.S. companies in the information technology industry during 2007, according to a report from research firm IDC.
Windows Vista will be installed on more than 90 million computers worldwide in its first year of shipment, according to IDC analyst John Gantz in a report. He said about 35 million units would be installed in the United States, driving nearly $4 billion in revenue to Microsoft.
Industry estimates for the Microsoft’s fiscal 2007 total revenue are around $50 billion.
“In the scheme of total IT spending” Vista revenue “will be small - about 1% of total IT spending in the US in 2007 and less than 4% of total spending on software, Gantz said.
Vista’s business versions entered the market on Nov. 30. The consumer version debut is scheduled for Jan. 30. Windows runs on about 90% of computers worldwide and is one of the two products (the other being Office) that make up about 90% of the company’s overall earnings. The last Windows update was in 2001 with Windows XP.
The report says that for every $1 of revenue that Microsoft earns from Vista, the technology “ecosystem” will reap $18. Microsoft’s partners are expected
In November as well, to pre-empt Sony’s PS3 release, MSFT converted its XBOX 360 into an actual entertainment system Microsoft’s vice president of entertainment and devices division (which oversees Xbox), Peter Moore, forecasts 13-15 million Xbox 360s by end the end of 2007, considering the news todat that just one year after the November 22, 2005 launch of the XBOX 360, MSFT will be unleashing over 1,000 hours of programming and getting TV content to an audience that has in the past few years avoided television for video gaming, this is an interesting development. We’re talking content from Ultimate Fighting Championship, CBS, Viacom, WB and many others.
Microsoft’s much ballyhooed music player, Zune, was unveiled to a lukewarm reception. But with sales of 1 million units projected by June, there’s a lot of upside for Redmond in music.
MSN Search? Well, sitting in third spot behind Google and Yahoo!, let’s just say that Microsoft has nowhere to go but up.
Best stat of all: in the past 12 months, Microsoft technically beat Google in terms of stock market return.
3. GOOGLE DOMINANCE (see video)
We’ve written plenty on Google. While Google’s stock did not have the torrid growth of previous years, its business model strengthened as it gained traction.
Highlights include Google entering Partnerships with Sun that suggest an Operating System might materialize sooner than later.
Google acquired numerous companies to develop an online productivity suite: online word processor Writely, a spreadsheet company and Wiki Jotspot. When it added bells and whistles in its Gmail email service – like the ability to open and save documents from Microsoft in Google’s productivity system – it what was the clearest signal yet that Google was planning an assault on Microsoft’s core business, as Microsoft staged a strike on Google’s search business with the launch (or is it a relaunch) of MSN Search.
If there was any doubt of Google’s supremacy online, it was made clear when in the third quarter, Google accounted for 25% of all US Ad Dollars spent online. Yep, that stat is correct. Google owns web search and web advertising.
To ensure that it could benefit from up and coming advertising trends such as video, Google went out and purchased YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion.
We still maintain that this deal was done before Steve Chen and Chad Hurley got a check from Sequoia, for our conspiracy theory, click here.
Google is also positioning itself for the wireless web and in fact to circumvent any spillover results of Net Neutrality becoming law. It has purchased tremendous amounts of dark fiber and rumors have circulated that Google might even make a run for a company like Level 3. Of course, these are merely rumors.
Google’s data mining ambitions continued to cause some to worry about Google’s long term plans. The company, quite simply, has more information on more people in more countries, than any other company at any point in history. And being in the information age, that is a cause for concern. Ironically, Google never had a registration service until a few years ago, but being able to track IPs and what not, it did not even that per se.
While we doubt Google can realistically overtake Microsoft in terms of market capitalization, it is feasible if many trends hold up. We also do not think that Google will be the first/only company to boast a market capitalization of a trillion dollars.
But we do know that Google is well on pace to be the Standard Oil and Microsoft of the 21st century.
We’re just not sure if that is a good or bad thing in the information age.
So we have covered #10 to #3, #2 and #1 have a lot to do with the “little guy” taking control of the helms due to major trends with media and technology. (see video)
- Broadband now reaches over 50% of households.
- US is no longer the sole engine of Web growth.
- Total web internet population just over 17%, at just over 1 billion people.
- Cheaper hardware.
- Technology companies opening up their Open APIs.
- Free publishing tools such as blogging software have enabled millions of new properties to launch and scale, thanks to RSS and other media sharing tools and applications.
- Podcasting, which earned the Word of the Year in 2005 by New Oxford American Dictionary continued to gain traction, though it remains a very small sector.
- Venture capitalists getting back into the game.
The Web 2.0 hype died down, but that was more of a matter of semantics than anything else. What it represented only got stronger.
So, without further ado, the top two trends and storylines of 2006 are:
2. EXPLOSION OF SOCIAL MEDIA (see video)
The term social media was first coined back in 2004. Chris Shipley (Co-founder and Global Research Director for Guidewire Group) used the term in the months leading up to The BlogOn 2004 conference in July 2004.
Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video.
Social media can include podcasts, videoblogging, photoblogging, blogging, wikis, mailing lists, bulletin boards, message boards, social bookmarking, multiple player gaming, social networks and viral video.
Social media, for the purposes of this article, is broken up into:
- Social news: digg vs. netscape
- Social bookmarking tools:
- Social networking: myspace, facebook, etc.
Our reasoning is that social bookmarking tools enable the sharing of media (what makes it social), whereas social networking tends to personal and entertainment oriented, social news is community oriented and generally informative.
Mainly, this is where we see the trends diverging in 2007. The model is too nascent to decree a final breakdown frankly.
By 2005, MySpace had galvanizes its leadership role and others began to develop niches. We no longer heard of new social networking sites replacing MySpace, but rather, competing with them.
What does the future hold for social media? Well, that’s up to you to decide, really.
1. ONLINE VIDEO (see video)
The trends that we highlighted above caused web video to simply explode. It was a matter of time really, but many of the people who expected web and video to mesh so well in the late 1990s were simply ahead of their time.
YouTube, a company that launched a mere 19 months ago scaled rapidly to now serve up 100 million daily video streams.
This year, Google ponied up $1.65 billion to acquire it. This was not a great thing for second tier video sites, many of whom will have a hard time gaining traction now that GooTube will consolidate the file sharing video space.
The online video industry is still largely nascent: 27 online video companies secured $126.7 million in financing in 2003, 23 secured $121 million in 2004, and 37 companies secured $160.7 million in financing in 2005 (Thomson Financial).
However, in 2005, the entire U.S. venture capital industry invested $20 billion in 3,000 new companies, so only 5.3% of that was invested in online video.
Most of these funded companies are video technology and distribution companies, very few are content companies.
Regardless, from the amateur filmmaker, to the funny home video sitting in one’s library, to libraries of film studios, the Web created an entirely new demand and market for them all.
Here is the link:
http://www.metamojo.com/video.php
The concept is pretty simple: it’s a meta search of other video search engines we like. It also features some of the video sites we work with, a way of returning the favor for them featuring our clips from WatchMojo.com.
We believe there is a fundemantal difference between text-based content meta search and video-based content meta search. Essentially, with the former, a user clicks on a result from an underlying search engine and bypasses the monetization state for the search engine by going straight to the website being indexed. With video meta search, since these are hosted on Google, YouTube, etc., we send traffic to the underlying search engines - where they can monetize the traffic as they wish.
We’re very bullish on online video, and being a producer of original video content alone does not cut it, in my eyes. So we also thought of creating a video search engine cause our visitors are in a video watching mindset, so why not give them the best of online video as well outside of WatchMojo.com?
It’s in the same spirit of our domain specific vertical search engine MetaMojo.com which returns best of breed results for each category. On MetaMojo.com (the regular, non video search engine), for music, you get results from Rolling Stone magazine, Billboard, Blender, etc. So on this video search, you get results from video engines we like. We currently index 10, but we will add more soon. We also have some bells and whistles for functionality that will come soon.
If you would like to partner up with us and submit your video index / database, email me at ash[@]mojosupreme.com. We’re going to automate the process very shortly, but we’d like some feedback first. Naturally, video search is in its infancy, and we think there are numerous approaches, all worthwhile.
Oh, you might enjoy the layout. The concept is you are walking on the street and you see a window display of a bunch of TVs… hence the “matrix layout.” Give it a try you will know what I mean. The layout is extremely barebones now… hence 0.1.
You can also choose if you want to lump results from one source, or “interleave” them (not a term I coined or like, frankly) which rotates one result from each source… it’s to avoid having people have to scroll down pages and pages of content, we fully expect other search engines to follow this (and it’s possible someone does something similar, since it’s not rocket science and we wonder why no one has done it yet).
Pretty soon we’re going to feature this across our network of hundreds of thousands of unique users on WatchMojo.com, the entire blog network and of course, the MetaMojo.com domain specific vertical search engine.
Enough yapping, enjoy. Send me feedback, questions, suggestions.
