YouTube rival Vessel secures fund raising

 

San Francisco based online video service  Vessel is launching a two-tier service – a free ad supported version and a £2.99 a month subscription tier promising fewer ads version and an early access to web’s teaser short version videos.

Vessel founded by two executives from Hulu – an online video service, CEO Jason Kilar and Techie Richard Tom.

Vessel has the backing of venture capitalist, Benchmark capital, Grey Lock partners and Amazon’s Boss Jeff Bezos Expeditions. Vessel has already signed up three YouTube Multichannel networks (MCNs) Machinima, Tastemade, DanceOn. You Tubers already on Shane Dawson, Marcus Butler, Casper Lee, Ingrid Neilsen and Rhett & Link. Vevo is a partner for Vessel’s ad supported tier.

The channels will receive 70% of the revenues advertisement running around videos on Vessel’s free tier, and also earn money from referral fees if their fans sign up to a subscription.

Google’s video service has over billion viewers, watching more than six billion hours of video every month and thousands of channels making six figure annual revenues.

There is  also Vimeo, (founded in November 2004 by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein), a video-sharing website in which users can upload, share and view videos,  with over 100m visitors per month and has 22m subscribers, fifteen per cent of their traffic comes from mobile devices and Dailymotion in 18 languages founded in March 2005 by Benjamin Bejbaum and Olivier Poitrey, are able competitors.

Vessel are actively luring viewers and star performers from YouTube, has sealed their second multimillion dollar fundraising in less than a year from  Institutional Venture Partners  – the Silicon Valley Venture firm that backed Snapchat, Twitter and Dropbox.

Vessel is reported to have raised  £38.53m ( $57.5m), in addition to the  £52m ($ 77m) it secured back in June 2014 from Benchmark, Greylock Partners and Bezo’s Expeditions.