By Rebecca Fannin, Contributor

  Continuing on my journey of exploration outside China (a brief detour),  I recently met with Dave Otten, the CEO of a New York-based startup with the intriguing name of LongTail Video. We met in a trendy café on W. 18th Street in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. Over coffee,  David described what LongTail Video does and how it has ramped up since 2007 into a profitable, 30-person shop that was recently lead financed with $5 million from Greycroft Partners. Interviewing Dave and hearing his startup story reminded me of reporting on the first generation of Chinese Internet startups, Joe Chen of Renren, Peggy YuYu of Dangdang, and Jack Ma of Alibaba — back before they became well-known entrepreneurs.  Having followed the venture capital trail from Silicon Valley to China and on to India and other startup hubs such as London, what I’m observing today among the entrepreneurs, VCs and angel investors in New York is an energy and buzz similar to what put these other places on the tech map. It’s little wonder that Dave McClure is opening a new co-working space for his 500 startups in the Flatiron district! What follows is a few highlights of my conversation with Dave, who with an MBA from Harvard, entrepreneurial experience, ample finance, and career stripes at Nielsen and About.com, seems destined to become a player. LongTail Video is one of the startups we’ll be featuring at our digital media innovators forum March 21 in New York. Q. How did come up with the idea for LongTail Video? A. I began working nights with my partner on developing an online video site and our idea was that it was all about the advertising side, how to help publishers make money from video. YouTube had just been acquired by Google, and we focused on how to make it easier to deliver ads into the beginning and end of a video stream. Q. What was the first breakthrough? A. We had no money at the time and we were developing this as a side project. It was technically complicated to integrate the video player with the portal site. We saw that many publishers were using the same software, JW Player. When we saw this, we went to the founder and said, ‘can we buy you?’ We bought the player for stock. Buying the player was the iceberg. There was a whole lot more going on under the water level to support how publishers can integrate the player with their content management system and support all file formats. So today we have this massive video player, used by 2 million domains. Q. How do you make money? A. It took some time for the video ad market to take off. We make money from an annual fee to license the video player software, sales to publishers, and we’ve built in a customized content management system that we offer and we can provide analytics for publishers on their video ads so they can better monetize them.  We expect revenues to reach $10 million to $15 million this year and we’ve been profitable since 2010. Q. Why did you raise venture capital at this …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest