Written by Om Malik
Posted Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 3:16 PM PT

 

NewCo Thinks It’s Worth a Billion Dollars

The pace with which the much-ballyhooed “YouTube killer” joint venture proposed by NBC and News Corp, code-named NewCo, is moving, we might as well call it OldCo.

But the company, which still doesn’t have a name, is making the rounds meeting venture capitalists, and private equity people trying to raise $100 million on a valuation of about $1 billion. Multiple sources both in New York and Silicon Valley have confirmed NewCo’s attempts to raise cash. PaidContent had reported on this last month, and since then things haven’t changed much.

Talk about chutzpah! Nevertheless, so far they have had very little luck in getting some investor to write the check for what remains to be a grand idea — and that’s all. There is a good chance that they might settle on a name very soon — that is before I start my holiday shopping.

I am still scratching my head on why this phantom company is proposing a valuation of a billion dollars. The glacial progress made by the so-called NewCo explains why MySpace launched MySpaceTV — a site that will showcase professional video, and will help Fox Interactive get a bit of online video advertising gravy on their plate.

Despite all the talk, it is hard to buy into the fact that this new company is going to be able to beat YouTube. According to Hitwise, the traffic at YouTube still is rising like a rocket. Its data shows that YouTube’s market share of U.S. visits has increased by 70 percent when comparing January 2007 to May 2007 (this only includes site visits, not streams or streams from views on embedded videos).

Hitwise says that in comparison, 64 other video sites increased by only 8 percent in that period. As of May 2007, YouTube’s market share was 50 percent greater than those 64 sites combined, Hitwise says.

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Topic: Money & Power

Comments (4)

  • Veetube.com wont be a bad name to call it, if they do have name problem.

    victor — 4:10 PM on June 27, 2007 Reply

  • I really think the NewCo guys are selling themselves short. Why settle for a billion dollar pre-money? I suspect the arguments for their current valuation would only be more compelling as they increased the pre-money. In fact, my guess is that NewCo 2.0, NewCo’s come lately competitor will be raising money at 2-4x NewCo’s pre-money. Their inflated pre-money valuation will give NewCo 2.0 a leg up and likely put the nail in NewCo’s gold plated casket. Just my two cents…

    Alexander Muse — 9:08 PM on June 27, 2007 Reply

  • Youtube is very very strong competitor. So it will not be easy to kill.:)

    Sameer — 10:35 AM on June 28, 2007 Reply

  • I have to say, that I could not agree with you in 100% regarding , but it’s just my opinion, which could be wrong :)

    Daniel — 12:00 PM on August 12, 2007 Reply

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