• Advertising Age, Tuesday, October 21, 2008 11:30 AM

Not many start-ups get a second chance. And Joost may be no exception. But the video-sharing site once falsely hyped as a "YouTube killer" is trying, taking its pitch to Madison Avenue once again as it attempts to crawl back from irrelevance with a new operating model -- and a lot of money in the bank.

To refresh your memory, Joost was the site launched about two years ago by the founders of Skype and Kazaa that offered free downloads of TV shows, as long as consumer were willing to first download some bulky software. It quickly fell into irrelevance as sites like Hulu.com and Veoh began offering the same shows without the irritating software. But Joost now claims to have learned its lesson, and wants advertisers to reconsider the service.

"In this day and age, when users have an enormous amount of choice, if you put barriers between them and the video, it makes it much more challenging," said Mike Volpi, who took over as CEO in summer 2007. The man knows of what he speaks.

Read the whole story at Advertising Age »