Founded by two former financial journalists, The Newsmarket has morphed into a business-to-business video syndication service - a long way from the reliance on expensive satellite feeds, tapes and bike couriers that still dominated the news broadcast market when the site launched in 2000.
From its early days in the wake of the dot com bust, Newsmarket has managed to grow through venture funding - Apax Partners, Softbank and Hearst - and investment from its co-founders and another $1m in angel funding to be profitability.
The site now employs a mighty 80 staff in five offices and is headquartered in New York.
Co-founder and chief executive Shoba Purushothaman explains why betting on video as the future of the web proved a sensible investment.
Co-founder and chief executive Shoba Purushothaman
• Explain your business to my Mum.
We use digital technology to help brands get their story and messages out in video format to journalists, bloggers and consumers.
• What's your background?
My co-founder and I did time as journalists at Dow Jones and Reuters respectively. We saw an opportunity to nurture our entrepreneurial fantasies when we realised that the marketing industry was gravitating from a text world to video and we launched a consulting business in the early 90s. This led us to realise that digital technology could transform how video content was distributed and that's how The NewsMarket came to be.
• How do you make money?
We charge content providers to host and distribute their video to the news media, bloggers and consumer audiences. We also get a 'brokerage fee' from content owners who use our platform to sell their content through our Marketplace business.
• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
More than 13,000 newsrooms in 193 countries use The NewsMarket, and we work with about 200 content providers. Our goal for 2008 is to double both our number of clients and users.
• How important is recommendation and filtering to your business?
Recommendations are key to our success, in both customer acquisition and user (journalists and bloggers) loyalty. Because we are a business-to-business model, filtering who gets access to our video archives has also underpinned our very focused execution and led to consistent high growth.
• Name your competitors.
Some people see YouTube as an indirect competitor but given that we are a pure business-to-business player, that doesn't really apply.
• What's your biggest challenge?
Finding the balance between short-term and long-term investments in people, resources and technology. We are a business-to-business platform and need to carefully find the balance between being ahead of our audiences but not so far that they think we are too innovative for them.
• What's the weirdest business experience you've had so far?
Pitching to venture capitalists in the post-dotcom-bubble, and post-9/11. At that time there was a lot of scepticism and even disrespect for entrepreneurs - I walked out of a venture firm after spotting a couple of business plans amidst empty cartons of pizza! To say that I gloated when some of these firms called me later during our second round and were practically begging to invest, would be an understatement.
• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
Yes, I think that in many ways we are in a bit of a bubble, albeit nowhere near are nutty as it was in the post 2000 era. It will once again be survival of the fittest models and a time for those who know how to execute. The flakier businesses will not survive but I think the shakeout will be good.
• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
The NewsMarket will be the universal platform content providers all over the world use to manage, share and exchange their video content. Including your Mum.
• Are you the next big thing?
You need to ask?
Are you sceptical? Can the growth of online video last? And what are they missing?
