When we were doing diligence on Virool we ran our own tests with the platform. We took one of our portfolio company's videos and Spent $300 promoting it. At the beginning the video had 15 views and 0 likes. We were able to finish the campaign in a day, and at the end there were 7322 impressions and 3000 views. Note that Virool only charges when a video has been watched for 30 seconds. The conversion of and impression to a 30 second+ view was above 35% for all of our campaigns and on mobile it was 70.32% (not that it mattered because you aren't charged on conversion of impressions).
The next day we had 5483 views, 28 likes, and 10 comments (almost all positive), without having paid for the incremental boost.
Your point about decreasing value and fake video promotions doesn't hold true with this test nor the experience of other customers. The views are not fake, they come from actual individuals who watch for 30 seconds from legitimate publishers. If they weren't then YouTube could strip a customer of their views as they did with Lady GaGa who lost 156mm views [1]. This hasn't happened once for Virool.
If you watch a video for 30 seconds it is highly doubtful that you are ignoring it. Virool doesn't do bottom of the page video pre-rolls that won't be seen but are counted as a charged view. If you are in an app, it seems odd that you would assume every user ignores a video for 30 seconds. You are correct that there will be plenty of people who do ignore, but as a Virool customer I am not getting charged when this occurs so it doesn't seem like a strong argument why their business is flawed.
Finally, you may feel that people after 1980 have been conditioned to ignore ads, but if companies like Facebook and Google are making billions in revenue from digital advertising, I doubt that marketers are shoving money their way if no one is looking at their ads. In 2012, US digital video advertising was estimated to be around $2.9bn out of a $37.3bn bucket for digital ad spend [2]. The market is still nascent and there is a continued shift of advertising dollars to online and mobile from the classic channels (print/tv/radio). The market isn't anywhere near saturated and I doubt it will be anytime soon.
I'm not doubting at all what you say as far as views, likes etc. I think, however, you are quite naive as far as Youtube deleting videos. Sure getting view counts in the millions in a day will get your video deleted but not 6k in a day. It would be nice if you could post the portfolio company's video so we could see if it had a viral nature to it.
Also, a video getting that many legitimate views in a day should have scored consecutive views in the following days - of course this is the nature of a video going viral.
As I understand it there are no requirements to becoming a publisher. Unless you are faking traffic or have questionable content (i.e. porn), as long as you hook into the API you are ready to go. Some of the publishers we talked to are making more money through Virool than any other ad product they have tried.
I am not a dev and we are investors in Apsalar so I am already biased, but our reference calls with Devs made us comfortable investing as they had tested Apsalar's product vs others and gave many compelling reasons why they were choosing the Apsalar platform. I think this Quora post does a great job of comparing mobile analytics platforms for iOS:
This isn't an exact science and still has levels of subjectivity that make it less of a predictive tool and more of a simple litmus test for the fit between the startup and our investment focus. Just because we aren't a fit doesn't mean that a startup will not be successful. Many of the companies that score low will go on to do very well, and conversely there will be some high-scoring startups that don't live up to expectations.
Forgive me, but that seems like an awfully cavalier attitude towards a process that you say you're putting a lot of time and effort into, and on which hinges such large investments and potentially large returns. Hasn't anyone there been curious whether the process actually works and how it could be improved?
Sorry if our article came off that way, it may not have been very clear from our post, but we look at startups from a number of different sources both in and out of our network.
As the junior guy in a VC firm AngelList applies even more because I don't have an extensive network compared to those that have been a VC for 10+ years. We are active users/big fans of what Naval and Nivi have been doing,and we led a Series A for FlashSoft from an intro on AngelList.
As for your article, I wasn't the cool kid at the table either (I remember sneaking off to play MTG at lunch periods). I am all for democratizing the fundraising process, and I actually think setting up some rules and parameters around how you rank startups helps focus how you look at a company even if it is "hot."
How exactly do you look at startups outside your network? Do you actually take seriously incoming email pitches or cold calls? Do you actively seek out little-known companies that you think you could add value to?
I am a little curious as to how the FlashSoft deal was introduced to you via AngelList, but I understand it's unlikely you'll be able to divulge much, if any, details on it. Even on AngelList, one has to have followers in order to request introductions; yet one has to be visible to get followers, and visibility is determined largely by follower count. I have a difficult time understanding how networks are formed on AngelList without having preexisting networks.
I think that your question will be a good topic for a future blog post, but as a quick answer regarding AngelList.
As an investor you specify which industries/verticals/geographies you are interested in. Their system then emails you with matches to those criteria, and FlashSoft initially came through this way. I then went and did more research on their full-length AngelList profile, shared with the team, did an intro to their CEO Ted, and the process started from there.
We hadn't ever met Ted, and this was their first institutional round as well. We didn't need to have a pre-existing connection or network, rather it was specific to the types of startups we wanted to receive information on. You can see the criteria that we set out here: http://angel.co/thomvest
