From Variety via Alley Insider:
FunnyOrDie raised a $15 million second round of funding late last year at a $100 million valuation.
No comment. All right, here’s a couple.
The $100M value probably reflects the fact that Funny or Die is a TV project using the Web. What I mean is, the same way that Tom Cruise (or any A-list actor that can put butts in the seats and is known to drive movie ticket sales) would command $20M a flick… I think the only behind-the-envelope calculation done to calculate valuation was that, frankly.
Don’t get me wrong, the Landlord bit did over 50M streams, which is sure to grab investor and advertiser attention, but if the purpose of this is to actually make investors’ money back (plus dare we add: at a healthy profit) then advertisers don’t care about how many streams something did, they care about how many streams something will do… because advertisers online pay for future impressions, not historical.
In this sense, Funny or Die will have a lot of difficulty creating enough content. This is why you saw the Tom Cruise spoof earlier this year… and will see more TV actors, writers, directors and producers turn to the site to get their shits and giggles, but that’s the problem, it will be a sandbox that will remain in vogue (like Steven Spielberg’s Pop.com was, and Ashton Kushter’s latest project du jour Katalyst is) but over time will fizzle and become a write-off against Sequoia’s more profitable web investments. Anyway, sorry for the shameless plugs, but here are a couple of our latest skits (unlike some, we produce 6-10 comedy skits per month, and that is amongst the 50-100 clips we produce per month across all categories):
WatchMojo Skits: Mayo Spritzer
See more on our MySpace channel here.
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