With all the gloom in the global economy, I got to wondering whether there is anything else going on in the world of business. I'm looking for growth because I think that's what will ultimately bring the economy out of the doldrums. Not surprisingly, that growth is coming from technology companies. In Growth Matters, I look at consumer technology companies that point the way to growth trends -- and in the process introduce services and products you may want to explore.
If you want to make sense of all the video on the Internet so you can view just the good stuff, then Veoh Networks may be worth a visit. I interviewed Veoh Networks' CEO, Steve Mitgang, who told me an interesting tale about Veoh's history: "The founder of Veoh [Dmitry Shapiro] was an expert in security for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. Video was active around enterprises as employees were watching more videos on YouTube."
As Mitgang pointed out, "People needed a way to find, organize, discover, and watch videos. Dmitry was interested in building a site to share longer-form videos to provide entertainment and to share experiences. There was increasing amounts of P2P traffic into the enterprise. He used his expertise in P2P security to build a site that would help people to organize, discover, and play back video in the Web."
Why this focus? As Mitgang explained, "Some companies think their role is to serve as a platform for TV on the Internet. However, if a friend sends you a video and you want to watch it, such platforms are not useful. That is why we decided to focus our platform on helping people to organize, find, discover, and watch videos."
Veoh makes money by selling advertising to companies that want to reach its "engaged" viewers. As Mitgang explained, "Veoh Networks has the highest engagement level of any Internet video site in part because we have longer videos. We get 100 million users per month and 250 million streams per month." And Veoh has grown fast. As Mitgang pointed out, "In 2007, we had between two million and three million unique visitors, and by 2009 we had 28 million unique visitors."
Are you going to try Veoh? Have you used it already? What do you think?
Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book is You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.
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