• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 5, 2015

To better compete against Periscope and other mobile-focused live video-streaming social networks, YouNow has raised an additional $15 million from Venrock, Oren Zeev and Comcast Ventures.

No charity case, YouNow already boasts more than 100 million user sessions a month, with more than 50,000 hours of new live-video content being created daily.

Setting itself apart from the competition is YouNow’s highly game-like user experience, which encourages live broadcasters to interact with audiences who reward them directly through in-app virtual good purchases. Broadcasters then receive a portion of the dollar value of those goods.

“We are proud that many of our creators make their livings live-broadcasting on YouNow,” according to Adi Sideman, founder and CEO of YouNow.

Exactly how many broadcasters are actually making their living via YouNow -- and what that translates to in real dollars -- is not quite clear.

On average, a daily YouNow user spends 51 minutes per day on the platform, according to internal estimates.

A number of partnerships have helped introduce YouNow to new audiences. In August, for instance, Huffington Post launched a weekly video series for millennials with the help of the streaming platform.

Catering to young users’ consumption habits, the new show encourages viewers to stream live video footage directly from their phones. In early tests, HuffPo said the show quickly racked up around 17,000 fans.

Other live video-streaming services continue to build out their offerings. Twitter-owned Periscope recently rolled out Web profiles for the desktop and is now letting users take screenshots of their video stream, easily shared with the broader Twitter universe.