Thomas Owadenko: When did your company launch?
David Burch: TubeMogul was founded in February of 2006 and we launched our free beta product in March of 2007, which had great reception. Through our users’ feedback, we developed more and more features, adding more sites and tools like distribution. We also started getting feedback from larger media companies willing to pay for other features, so we launched our new Premium Products at DEMO 08.
TO: Where is the company located?
DB: The company was founded in Berkeley, California by UC Berkeley graduate students and was housed in a new business incubator there. The company recently moved into larger offices in nearby Emeryville, California.
TO: Why did you launch?
DB: We recognized that video creators were posting videos across the internet and had no easy way to measure the performance of those videos, nor a good way of effectively distributing them.
TO: What are the strengths of your products?
DB: Because we partner with video sharing sites and have APIs to both distribute content and bring back viewership information, we have a very rich data set and a scalable product.
TO: How many people work for the company?
DB: We have 12 employees, and are growing quickly.
TO: Who are your clients?
DB: Our clients vary from larger media companies, agencies and marketers managing large brands on down to smaller film-makers, journalists and politicians–in short, the panoply of people who want to gain large audiences online and need to know information about their viewership.
TO: Why did they choose you?
DB: Our intuitive interface, our free distribution and reporting tools and our more-advanced Premium Products are all raved about by customers. We give the small guy free tools to maximize and measure his reach online, and larger media and marketers the tools they need for their sponsors and clients.
TO: What are your thoughts on the Google Universal and video SEO frontier?
DB: Video SEO is a reality that a lot of people are just starting to figure out. If you distribute across video sharing sites and are intelligent with your meta data, you are very likely to be in top organic search results. This is largely made possible by Google Universal (and the equivalent at Ask, Yahoo, and MSN), which integrates relevant video results into search pages, boosting video’s relevance. The highest results at Google are not necessarily videos from YouTube or Google Video, either.
We are providing the tools to empower the foremost experts in video SEO and the new media marketing agencies that are involved in video SEO. Together we are at the beginning of the learning curve of what can be done.
TO: Did you raise money?
DB: The company recently announced $1.5 million in Series A funding from Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners. Prior to that, seed financing was provided by investors such as David Toth, the founder of Net Ratings, the first internet metrics company.
TO: What are your priorities for the coming year?
DB: This year, we are focused on growing our user base and continuing to improve upon our valuable products.
