Sony's acquisition of Grouper yesterday set off media speculation that other online video acquisitions would be next. Revver.com, Guba, Instant Media, Veoh Networks, Heavy, Metacafe.com and a host of
others offer effectively the same thing as Grouper, with minor differences. But at $65 million, did Grouper go cheap or expensive?
MarketWatch says that for a site registering 630,000 unique
users (just enough to crack the Nielsen//NetRatings top 20 video sites) $65 million is an awful lot of money. Metacafe, Break.com, vidiLife, Veoh Networks, StupidVideos, ManiaTV, Dumpalink and
KillSomeTime all rank higher in online video than Grouper, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, MSN Video and AOL Video make up the top five. So what do we learn from
this? Other online video sites would be likely to fetch more money because they have higher traffic. Why so much money? Because JupiterResearch tells us that just 2 percent of online spending goes to
video ads. The market hasn't even begun, and the potential is big. How big? Columnist Bambi Francisco predicts that ad dollars going to video will one day be greater than the massive spending that has
gone to search and other forms of text advertising.
Read the whole story at MarketWatch »
