Erick Shonfeld reports on TechCrunch that Fora.TV, the "thinking person’s YouTube," has raised additional seed money from original investor William Randolph Hearst III along with a new investor in Adobe. And, the company is poised to raise $5 million in series A venture round within 90 days, founder Brian Gruber tells Erick.
The company posts long-form speeches from high-level academic and institutional conferences. The business model is channel sponsorships. The audiences are small, but authoritative and desirable by marketers seeking to reach influencers.
In some ways, this high end, niche programming model is like Beet.TV. In fact we have similar web traffic, according to this graph from Alexa I’ve pasted below. (Not sure about video streams over at Fora, but Beet.TV is streaming and downloading about 150,000 per month.)
A few weeks back, we visited to Fora.TV and interviewed Brian Gruber. I’ve reposted the interview above.
Congrats Brian on the new funding, the sponsorship with Pfizer and continued success.
Please see my interview with Will Hearst about his views on online video and investment in the space.
You can find this interview with Brian above.
Andy
