Accel And Stripes Bet Big On Video Content With $61 Million Investment In Pond5

Pond5 just scooped $61 million Series A from Accel Partners and Stripes group.

The media marketplace, which crowd sources video clips from more than 30,000 freelancers across 127 countries, will use the cash to grow globally and hire talent (and to make a video with Macklemore’s Ryan Lewis—see below). Pond5 currently has 2.7 million, royalty-free videos on its site. It offers a 50/50 split with its video contributors.

The media industry is in a flux. The business model is broken—at least in the world of print media. But we’re consuming more content than ever before. Screens are everywhere. Video—now the most valuable content around--has freed itself from the living room and jumped to smartphones, tablets and computers. Couple that with 100-channel cable services, Roku and Apple TV streaming boxes, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and YouTube (not to mention lucrative video ads) and you get ravenous demand for quality moving images.

Just look at the latest report that News Corp tried to buy Time Warner for $80 billion—the deal was an attempt at a massive land grab for creative talent and content.  Accel and Stripes see this demand and are betting that marketplaces like Pond5 will make a bundle producing chum for the media feeding frenzy.

It’s a crowded space. Shutterstock , which offers more than 35 million photos, and is jumping into the video and music game, went public in the fall of 2012 and has since surged 240% to a market cap of $2.78 billion. Also in the mix is privately held Getty Images. With this $61 million investment, Accel and Stripes are signaling the market has a lot more room to grow. Digital technology platforms are an incredible vehicle for delivering media quickly and cheaply, but they all need enticing products to ship. As Jane Friedman, former head of News Corp's HarperCollins and founder of Open Road media, told me a few months back:   "You have to own the pipes, but if you don’t have anything flowing through it, what are the pipes going to do?"

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