As video Web sites from user-generated YouTube to studio-approved Hulu get more hits every day, it makes sense that a site like OVGuide.com would emerge.
It can serve as a one-stop index to video sites across cyberspace.
“Channels like Hulu and Veoh aggregate videos,” said Dale Bock, founder of OVGuide.com, “we aggregate those video sites.”
Traffic is robust: It attracts an average of 6 million people to the site every month.
That’s a drop in the bucket compared with the 70 million visitors YouTube drew last month, but Beverly Hills-based OVGuide.com is only two years old with a dozen employees.
A few months after Bock launched the site from his living room, Time Magazine ranked it as one of top 10 best new sites. Bock watched as traffic swelled from a handful of visits to 5,000 people a day. That’s when he reached out to David Bohnett, a former colleague at XDrive, a Santa Monica online storage company sold to AOL in 2005.
Bohnett had been an avid investor in local Internet ventures, such as Stamps.com and NetZero.com now a part of United Online after his own company, Geocities, sold to Yahoo in 1999.
“I saw a tremendous market opportunity here,” said Bohnett, who is now OVGuide.com’s chief executive. “No other site has a complete index of hundreds and hundreds of video sites. And we give our users an editorial perspective on what to watch.”
OVGuide indexes video sites by category and by popularity. The company’s proprietary technology has also turbocharged its search function so that when a user searches for a title, OVGuide not only searches across its main index, but also searches each listed video site such as YouTube.
Skating Away
Crave Online, which owns and operates 30 Web sites tailored for young men, has acquired two hockey-related sites: HockeysFuture.com and HFBoards.com.
Both sites add a combined 700,000 unique visitors per month to the company’s already well-trafficked sites. Crave’s properties and its affiliate sites garner 32 million unique visitors a month. This is about double the traffic its competitor Maxim enjoys.
The company’s properties include CraveOnline.com, the flagship site that features content on games, sports, movie and humor; mixed-martial arts site Sherdog.com; and basketball sites HoopsVibe.com and StreetBallTalk.com.
“We’re acquiring these enthusiast sites as a way to build up our content and become a leader in the sports category,” said Mike Dodge, general manager of parent company Atomic Online.
Baldwin Hills-based Atomic has bought three Web sites per month since August, with the goal of building an e-publishing empire comparable to Conde Nast in print.
Atomic Online runs more than 50 sites with about 70 full-time employees. Forty are in L.A. and about half are devoted to Crave Online.
Ad Investment
It looks like the time has come for little ads, because one L.A. company is getting big money for them.
Spot Runner, an online service that allows marketers to buy ad spots on local cable and broadcast TV, has raised $51 million from the parent company of the Louis Vuitton brand and International media groups.
The new investors are French luxury retailer Groupe Arnault/LVMH, U.K. media group Daily Mail and General Trust, and Spanish-speaking media company Grupo Televisa, along with hedge fund Legg Mason Capital Management.
The recent cash injection brings the two-year-old L.A. company’s total funding to $133 million, previously raised through CBS, Interpublic Media and other investors.
Brands Promotion
Joseph Rosenblum has been promoted to chief technology officer of Internet Brands Inc.
He was previously vice president of technology development at the El Segundo-based online media company. Previously, he was at Earthlink Inc.
Internet Brands was formerly known as Carsdirect.com, a 1998 spinoff from Pasadena tech incubator Idealab. The company has since acquired 50 e-commerce and community Web sites in the categories of auto, home and travel.
Software Staffing
Bob Khanpour is the new chief technology officer of L.A.-based Interneer, software developer for Web applications.
Khanpour joins the firm from Lending Dynamics, where he was chief technology officer.
Interneer is backed by Groundwork Equity and the company’s chief executive Michael Edell, former founder of eLabor, which was sold to Microsoft in 2002.
Staff reporter Booyeon Lee can be reached at
[email protected]
or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.
