Unless you’ve been in retreat the last few years, you’re probably well aware of the meteoric rise of YouTube. And indeed, the pioneering online video site easily ranks as the dominant player in the field, with more than three times the market share of No. 2, the Avis of online video, MySpaceTV.
But what a growing field it is. The folks over at VentureBeat posted a nice item today about an up-and-comer in the online video arena, Metacafe, which just closed a $30 million Series C funding round. That’s on top of the $15 million it’s already taken in. Metacafe is an Israeli company that moved to Palo Alto last year. VentureBeat makes a good point—that $30 million is a lot of money. Especially for an online video site. Especially when you consider that YouTube raised only about $11.5 million before being gobbled up by Google for $1.6 billion.
The new round was led by DAG Ventures of Palo Alto, CA, and Highland Capital Partners, which is headquartered in Lexington, MA. Highland partner Richard de Silva, who works in the firm’s Menlo Park, CA, office, will join the board. Here’s the Highland press release.
VentureBeat reports in an update that Metacafe’s traffic has ballooned to more than six million unique visitors per month in the U.S. this year, double its previous level. Globally, the company claims 27 million visitors per month. That’s enough to put it in 8th place overall for the month of July, according to Hitwise.
UPDATE: There’s a nice table of the Top Ten with VentureBeat’s story. We had to wait to get permission from Hitwise to run it. We did. Here it is. Just click on it to enlarge.
