Gazette: Canadian online video start-ups could thrive

Canadian small businesses thrive when given the opportunity to compete on a level playing field with the big guys. Punitive pricing for Internet "overuse" could threaten the Montreal-based start-ups described in this article & many more Canadian ventures (yours, perhaps?). Let's fight for a strong, diverse, and competitive digital economy.

Article by Jason Magder for The Montreal Gazette:

It has taken five years, but Montrealer Ashkan Karbasfrooshan has finally started turning a profit producing videos for the Web.

His company, WatchMojo, was formed in 2006 and recently surpassed 600 million all time views of its catalogue of more than 7,000 videos. But while the company has seen its audience grow steadily, revenue growth has been more slow to come.

Now WatchMojo is one of many companies well placed to take advantage of an explosion of video content, and a rush to buy ads attached to online videos.

WatchMojo employs 13 people, and produces about 50 to 100 videos per month, consisting of documentaries, educational videos and celebrity news, which are distributed on YouTube, or on the websites of its customers such as Bell Media, and Postmedia, the newspaper group that owns The Gazette. Karbasfrooshan said he founded the company with the hypothesis that advertisers would pay to sponsor videos that are professionally produced, as opposed to the amateur videos on You Tube.

“We recognized an opportunity to produce quality video,” he said. “But when I started, most people thought we were crazy.” Read more »

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Read more at montrealgazette.com