Veoh is raising a round, claims to be pretty big and growing

from venturebeat

Updated with more information from the company

Online video startup Veoh is in the process of raising a $40 million
round at a proposed $150 million valuation and has hired investment
bank Bear Sterns to help with the effort, Silicon Alley Insider
reports.

San Diego-based Veoh is a distant competitor to market leader YouTube,
but still claims to be growing at a healthy rate. The site features
user-created videos, clips from partners such as the Independent
Comedy Network, as well as content from large companies like Viacom.
From what we hear, the company is well respected in the media world,
partially because it's made a point of forging partnerships with
entertainment companies.

However, Veoh's traffic numbers are contested, as they have been at
least since the company raised $26 million round last spring (our
coverage).

Last December, third-party analytics firm Comscore showed Veoh
bringing in nearly 16 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, with
only 3.5 million of those in the US. That's versus YouTube's nearly
250 million. Meanwhile, rival analytics firm Nielsen says Veoh
received more than 2 million unique US viewers in December (not
visitors).

[Update: Veoh tells me it has more than 23 million monthly video
viewers worldwide, defined as people who started playing a video on
the Veoh home site or on a Veoh video embedded in another site. It
says that Nielsen's panel may be missing large chunks of Veoh traffic,
because the panel is comprised of the wrong demographic. It says that
using a separate Nielsen tracking service, the web analytics firm
obtained numbers much closer to Veoh's own.]

Today, Spark Capital investor Bijan Sabet, who sits on Veoh's board,
writes that Nielsen's numbers are wrong, after SAI cited them in its
article.

Sabet says that Veoh's internal server logs show 21 million unique
monthly viewers in December, up from 2.5 million at the beginning of
the year. He also says that users are watching more than 30 million
hours of Veoh videos per month, now.

So maybe Veoh is pretty big, but like every other video company, it is
trying to figure out how to monetize. Many startup rivals have also
raised large amounts of money. Two examples: Last year, DailyMotion
raised $30 (our coverage) and MetaCafe raised $34 million (our
coverage). Hosting and streaming lots of videos gets expensive, and
right now there's no way to cover costs.

[Update: I asked the company about monetization. Veoh says the average
user spends more than 87 minutes on the site per month, with much of
the viewing happening during evening prime time hours. It says its
audience presents great opportunities for brand advertisers.]