Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#2Congrats Alex!
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#3Naive question: Is there a technical definition that differentiates a Seed round from Series A?
I used to think
- Seed round was raised from friends and family - but this one has tonnes of institutional investors.
- Seed rounds typically raise - Seed rounds happen before the business is well defined - also not true in this case.
So why is this called a seed round and not a Series A?
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#4Naive question: Is there a technical definition that differentiates a Seed round from Series A? I used to think - Seed round was raised from friends and family - but this one has tonnes of institutional investors. - Seed rounds typically raise - Seed rounds happen before the business is well defined - also not true in this case. So why is this called a seed round and not a Series A?
It's probably a seed round and not an A round from the terms the round was raised. Typically an A round comes with different terms like boards seats, lead investors, pro-rata right etc. Also A rounds are always priced rounds with stock issued. Seeds are normally not priced and instead debt (convertible note) is issued.
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#5Naive question: Is there a technical definition that differentiates a Seed round from Series A? I used to think - Seed round was raised from friends and family - but this one has tonnes of institutional investors. - Seed rounds typically raise - Seed rounds happen before the business is well defined - also not true in this case. So why is this called a seed round and not a Series A?
It's probably a seed round and not an A round from the terms the round was raised. Typically an A round comes with different terms like boards seats, lead investors, pro-rata right etc. Also A rounds are always priced rounds with stock issued. Seeds are normally not priced and instead debt (convertible note) is issued.
I believe board seats and lead investor/pro-rata rights are just negotiation terms and not a must for a Series A.
Your other point is a good one. If there was no valuation and only convertible notes were issues, then I understand why this would not be a Series A.
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#6I would have called it Vireel.
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#7It doesn't seem like the service involves virality at all, they just provide an affiliate network to serve videos on for a fee. Like a video version of AdSense. Am I missing something?
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#8It doesn't seem like the service involves virality at all, they just provide an affiliate network to serve videos on for a fee. Like a video version of AdSense. Am I missing something?
"Like a video version of AdSense"
No...I think you got it's value pretty dead-on there.
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#9How do you scale something that decreases in value with every new customer it acquires? You can only pump so many fake video promotions into a market before it's completely saturated and people start to resent the constant assault of your ads. Not to mention the fact that every Tom, Dick and Jane with a camera is already pushing their own videos every chance they get.
Then there's this:
> “All [Jimmy Kimmel] had done was expose [the Double Rainbow] video to a couple hundred million people who would find this video interesting to them,” Debelov says. (Actually, [Kimmel] tweeted it to his 90,000 Twitter followers). “We’ve taken that process, and reversed engineered it. We can’t guarantee your video will go viral because it all depends on your content, but we can get it in front of a million, two million, half a million, whatever your budget is – we can get you in front of that audience.”
You've reverse engineered the power of celebrity? Highly doubtful. When a comedian with the clout of Jimmy Kimmel calls something the "funniest video in the world"[1], his fans are going to watch that video. When those same people see a video advertisement at the bottom of a blog post or in one of their mobile apps, they're going to ignore it. Hell, even celebrity has its limits -- Kimmel's suggestions would be ignored if he started posting random videos rather than specific links of his own choosing.
Anyone born after 1980 has been conditioned since adolescence to ignore online advertisements. It's gotten to the point where you have two choices: 1.) Make your ad so obtrusive that it might actually cost you users, or 2.) Don't infuriate your users, and settle for a CTR of .01% on a good day. I can only see this service reinforcing that conditioning.
Re: Virool (YC S12) Raises $6.62 Million “Seed” Round To Help Make Videos Go Viral
#10"He kept fielding from clients at the time was “can you help me make these videos go viral?” "No... but..."
In search marketing, the question is "Can we get to top of Google?"
And the answer can be yes if the client is willing to go pay-for-play (AdWords).
So these guys basically built their own platform to do pay-for-play, I'm assuming.