MySpace ex-chairman buying ‘how-to’ video site
A company founded by MySpace.com’s ex-chairman is announcing on Tuesday its purchase of video site ExpertVillage.com to bolster its “how-to” archives.
Demand Media did not release the financial terms of the purchase.
ExpertVillage, founded last year, operates a site with about 17,000 videos that run one to three minutes each on everything from reducing jet lag to grooming pets to car detailing. The company said it was already one of the top 10 channels on Google’s YouTube video sharing site.
How-to videos represent some of the most-sought-after content on search engines, Forrester analyst Charlene Li said. “It’s an immediate need.”
ExpertVillage matches professional and amateur filmmakers with projects of interest to Web audiences. Topics are created from a proprietary algorithm that sifts through data related to what people search on the Web, Demand Media founder and former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt said.
Filmmakers agree to produce how-to films, such as one on belly-dancing, for example, and they are paid by the site for them. ExpertVillage retains the copyright.
“We intend on increasing the scale of ExpertVillage’s existing business and expanding into new content areas,” Rosenblatt said.
The site’s videos will be made available to Demand Media’s other properties including eHow, a text how-to site. Videos will also be available to regular users looking to post clips on their own social network sites.
ExpertVillage faces mounting competition in online how-to videos. London-based rival VideoJug launched a U.S. version in June and now has more than 15,000 how-to videos created by its own staff. VideoJug said this month it planned to add 100,000 more videos to the site over the summer.
Forrester’s Li said Demand’s expertise was in improving the quality and volume of traffic to a site from search engines, and then “sell advertising around it.”
Demand has been buying up relatively unknown sites since last year and relaunching them with social networking features and video capabilities that serve specific niche interests.
Rosenblatt is best known for brokering the sale of Intermix, which owned MySpace, to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million in 2005.