Homeveda, a health video content site focusing on natural health and well ness has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Blume Ventures. The company provides short 2 to 3 min do-it-yourself (DIY) videos on its website, on its its YouTube channel and Blinkx, as well as via telecom operators Airtel and Vodafone. Interestingly, they are also available on DTH, with Tata Sky. A note from Blume says that Homeveda will use the funding to scale up operations and create deeper and wider content in its niche, as well as develop mobile apps. The company recently launched on Roku as a standalone channel, and claims to have done over 150,000 views in the first month. Homeveda was launched in May 2012, by Harsh Rohatgi, Vinay Mishra & Hitesh Bhagia, and claims over 200,000 subscribers and close to 30 Million views on YouTube alone.
A few things to note about this company: it appears to have chose the right segment to focus on, with both health and education content being evergreen, especially on YouTube. The key challenge they’ll face is with constantly battling changes in YouTube algorithms, but by taking a hybrid approach, in terms of both being present on YouTube and launching their own destination, and also being on other platforms for monetization, the company does appear to have protected itself from the vagaries of YouTube. The other important aspect here is that the content has global appeal, which ensures that it isn’t dependent on the abysmally low CPM rates in India, and this is reiterated with 60% of its traffic comes from outside India, with the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the Middle East contributing to the bulk of it.
On the face of it, this appears to be a pretty smart pick from Blume, even though this has to be a longer term deal since growth in views and revenues isn’t entirely dependent on how much content you can produce. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Homeveda diversify into other content segments, and/or aggregate videos as a health specific multi-channel network. This is a volume game, and once you have the numbers, it’s about promotion and packaging and repackaging of content.
We’re likely to see more investments in the video content ecosystem in 2014, especially with the growth of YouTube. Wait and watch.
Other ventures in the health video content include MDhil. Do read our interview with Mdhil founder Nandu Madhava: Part 1 and Part 2.
