Dallas-based ViewMarket, a video content network, has acquired Houston-based media website CultureMap in a $15 million deal.
ViewMarket wanted CultureMap’s platform, says Alexander Muse, co-founder of the Dallas company. “They are already monetizing their content in a profitable way,” he told me in an interview Wednesday evening. “We’re going to take that existing sales organization and leverage it across the video content we are producing.”
View Market was formerly known as Haul, a company that served as a sort of talent agency connecting “haulers”—teenage girls, typically, showing off their latest purchases in Youtube videos—with advertisers and retailers in an online marketplace. View Market extends the subject matter beyond shopping to men’s sports and fitness, baby care, and other topics.
Investors include Dave McClure, the founder and head of 500Startups, Will Bunker of the Silicon Valley Growth Syndicate, and David Matthews, the co-founder and managing director of Dallas’s VentureSpur accelerator, which is now known as Revtech.
CultureMap currently has sites in Houston, Dallas, and Austin. The company plans to expand to San Antonio, Atlanta, and Jacksonville in the coming months, Muse says. Though the Houston-based CultureMap will now be brought under the View Market umbrella in Dallas, no employee changes are expected. Muse, who is an Xconomist, will become the company’s chief product officer with current ViewMarket CEO Robert Bennett remaining in his role.
In the works is repairing CultureMap’s “horrible mobile product,” Muse says. “They (CultureMap has) a non-existent video product.”
In fact, ViewMarket has already begun placing some of its videos on the Dallas site. The full mobile platform is about a month away, Muse says. “The entire website is going to change.”
