Online news video site Mediascrape raises $3.16 million
Mediascrape, an online video site that translates and syndicates international news, has raised $3.2 million from unknown investors.
There aren’t many more details at this point. Partners include BBC News, Reuters, CBC News, Asia News International and thirty other leading news broadcasters around the world, the company claims. It also allows individuals to submit their own news stories.
The Montreal, Canada-based company is a bit strange, though, as Techcrunch’s Duncan Riley notes:
The site has received fairly extensive positive press coverage in Canada, but there are a couple of oddities that I cant quite work out. There was no details on the investors… the $3.2 million is a second round, and yet when they talked to the Montreal Gazette in September 2007 when they took $1 million, they claimed the $1 million was their third round (making todays round the 4th). They claim to be a “leading online broadcast news network” and yet their traffic is so small that they aren’t being tracked by comScore, and even Alexa puts them at over 200,000; their so-called YouTube syndication deal has only netted 714 videos in 7 months, with most videos getting viewer numbers only in the low three figures. Then there’s the web site, with the cheap logo, the stolen BBC world map down the left hand side, cheapy Google logos and just a general look and feel of a site done on the cheap, not by a company with 2-4 rounds of funding who apparently leads the field in news syndication.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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