In video funding news, ExpoTV.com is announcing today that it’s closed a Series A round of funding for $6 million. The round was led by Masthead Venture Partners and Prism VentureWorks.
ExpoTV is all about consumer recorded video product reviews. The company says that more than 20,000 reviews have been uploaded to date. Those reviews are then syndicated out to sites including AOL, Yahoo, Google, YouTube and in the best integration, Buy.com (example). The company also delivers those reviews, along with expert opinions and video advertisements through video on demand partnerships with cable providers around the country.
Last month the company began paying video uploaders one penny for each time their reviews are viewed. When that announcement was made the company said it had more than 12,000 product reviews - so it looks like the site nearly doubled in one month by rewarding users financially.
Upon hearing the news, I immediately thought of ShopWiki, a company that pays users to submit video reviews of products listed in it’s wiki style shopping guide. ShopWiki is also well backed. I can’t help but wonder whether building a catalog of video reviews to send elsewhere is a better plan than building that catalog only as added value to your existing site.
One way or the other, it’s an obvious niche in the consumer generated video market. Like UnBoxing videos, consumer reviews (the positive ones at least) provide the kind of marketing fodder that companies have sought desperately to outsource to authentic consumers for some time.
David Beisel of Masthead General Partners posted this afternoon about the investment, saying he sees ExpoTV as a uniquely powerful example of social commerce.
December 20, 2006 at 11:11 am
Hi - I’m the President of Expo and I just wanted to drop a note and say thank you for the write-up. While we’ve gotten a fair amount of pick-up from the announcement, this is the piece I’ve commented on….you did an extraordinarily good job looking beyond the press release. Not only do you truly comprehend what we’re doing, but you managed to capture it very succinctly. I’m looking forward to seeing splashcast launch simply because anyone who can decompose someone else’s business this easily is clearly going to bring some great innovations to the market. Best wishes on your launch. Bill
January 15, 2007 at 3:55 am
hello, have nice day