On HipMojo 26, Rebecca and I chat about the Facebook IPO. Enjoy:

And watch our profile of Mark Zuckerberg below:

Nice to see fellow video content producers Revision3 doing well.  In their yearly update they boasted about increases in:

- Viewership: by 359% to Nearly 800 Million
- Revenue: by 53% Year-Over-Year

As you can see from my table above, some companies raise a boatload a VC, others less so.  We never raised a dime… but with the market maturing it looks like there will be a number of winners who managed to survive to thrive.

That table only includes content companies, the list of VC-funded distribution and tech companies would be much longer and much more “in the red”.

As WatchMojo celebrated its 6-year anniversary on Monday January 23, on Show 25 of HipMojo, Rebecca asks me about some of the highlights of WatchMojo’s first 6 years.  Enjoy:

Recently I moderated a panel at Streaming Media West.  Panelists included Michael Schwalb (Tremor Media), Mark Suster (VC at GRP), Eric Anderson, (VP, Content and Product Solutions, Samsung Electronics America) and AJ McGowan (CTO at Unicorn Media).

We covered a lot, and at the risk of bragging the feedback was very good (I’ll be moderating a panel at Streaming Media East in May 2012).

There was a lot of interesting things that were discussed, but of note was one thing Mark Suster said (at the 8:50 mark) about how the media is reporting that YouTube is spending $100 million on content, whereas he claims the actual figure is $250 million.  Does it actually matter?

Well, yes and no. The mere fact that YouTube is guaranteeing money to content makers in exchange for exclusive content is a shift in the video content market.  But if the company did indeed spend $250 million and not only $100 million, that might explain why Hulu will be committing $500 million for content in 2012, even though it “only” generated $420 million in revenues in 2011.

I’ve now moderated two panels at Streaming Media, once last summer at SM East and once this past fall at SM West. Noteworthy on the LA panel was Marc Suster’s assertion that Google had spent closer to $250 million - and not the $100 million the media was reporting - on YouTube’s content initiative.  I touched on that in my TechCrunch article “Can Content Producers Be Disruptors Or Is Content Only Meant To Be Disrupted?“  Anyway, in LA, after my  I conducted an interview where we touched on many themes.  One of the topics was the fact that WatchMojo had not raised any VC and we had bootstrapped.

The article’s title was: WatchMojo Wins with Slow and Steady Online Video Growth.

Not bad, but then the sub-title was: While it might not be the biggest video site, WatchMojo.com doesn’t answer to VCs—and that’s a good thing.  Had I become one of the poster children against VCs?  I hope not.  So I decided to balance that with a series of posts on TechCrunch to share the pros and cons of fundraising:

- Lies Entrepreneurs Tell (with one of them being “I don’t want to raise money”, something a lot of entrepreneurs say)
- Why Salespeople Make Bad Fundraisers
- Why Bootstrapping Is Just As Over-Rated As Raising Venture Capital
- Things Entrepreneurs Should Avoid When Raising Capital
- Six Lessons in Entrepreneurship - which was published today and covers 6 lessons I’ve learned as WatchMojo celebrates its 6-year anniversary tomorrow, Monday January 23 2012.

Here’s the video of my interview at Streaming Media West, where we also talk about big media’s lobbying to curtail piracy:

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With CT running from the Feds again busy and unable to join us, Rebecca steps in for show #24.  We talk about:

- the things entrepreneurs should avoid when fundraising; based on a very popular article I wrote on TechCrunch.

- whether or not Hulu is pivoting?

In show 23 of HipMojo, WatchMojo producer and host Rebecca Brayton steps in for CT and chats with me about

1) the pros and cons of bootstrapping versus raising money from VCs,
2) how companies that manufacture an audience through technology are beating those who build real audiences and
3) the nature of Montreal as a startup city.

Not a coincidence, I wrote three articles on those topics in the past week, one for TechCrunch, the other for MediaPost and the latter for NextMontreal, which upset some VCs and inspired some entrepreneurs (which was sort of the goal).

On HipMojo 22, CT offered his predictions for 2012 while I gave my “anti-predictions”, things wannabe experts (like yours trul) keep insisting will happen but seldom do.  To be clear, these are all trends that are occuring, but change takes time.  That was the gist of the article, I wasn’t implying that these are false statements or hype alone.  Read the article or watch CT and I ranting (ok, me ranting):

In my end-of-year series for MediaPost, we asked a number of online video professionals three questions.

The professionals included:

-      Brian Fitzgerald, CEO of Evolve (content producer, publisher, ad representation)

-      Matt Heiman, CEO of Diagonal View (content producer)

-      Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 (content producer)

-      Adam Singolda, CEO of Taboola (distribution and aggregation)

-      Brett Wilson, CEO of Tubemogul (distribution and ad network)

-      Steve Woolf, VP content blip (aggregation and network)

Article 1: What was the biggest news/development/trend of 2011 in online video?

Article 2: Looking Back At 2011: The Unexpected.

Article 3: Predictions For 2012.

Enjoy.

I’m catching up on embedding the last four HipMojo shows on the blog we’ve been publishing them on WatchMojo, YouTube and other distribution partners but many of our 8 viewers (haha) follow the show via this blog.  This is the 2011 year in review show CT and I did in December where we talk about the stories in new media and tech that caught our attention.  Enjoy: