With the decline in ad revenue across the Internet, video search engine OVGuide.com is doing something right it seems – keeping 100% of its ad revenue. In January of 2009, OVGuide announced it has finally become profitable. On top of that, today announced it recently raised $5 million in funding from Baroda Ventures. They plan on using this round to invest into engineering to improve their search engine.
Unlike Hulu and Joost, which host their videos, OVGuide is simply a search engine. The site has hand picked a few hundred destinations it searches through, including TV Shack.com, Ninja Video.com, Hulu.com, Movielab.com, ESPN.com. For the most part, if your searching for something that’s probably not released yet, like a new movie or old TV show, OVGuide will find a site that hosts it illegally. Expect a low quality video or missing link.
OVGuide incorporates advertisements in a very, let’s say, forceful manner. For example, you conduct a search and they give back a list or confusing results. I searched “The Office” and got results from NBC, Hulu, TVShack, and a random one saying “Office Space- Mexico.”
Furthermore, when you click a link which leads you to the video, the site crossfades into a sponsored link which you have to click a ‘skip’ button to get out of.
OVGuide, based out of Beverly Hills, announced it received over 12 million unique visitors, 150 million page views and 36 million searches in January of 2009 alone.
