Market Watch: A pair of top venture-capital firms are putting their money where Adam Curry’s mouth is. The former MTV VJ has secured $8.85 million in backing for his venture, PodShow Inc.
“There is little that gets Valley girls and boys as hot and bothered as when an Internet company gets funded by both Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,” Private Equity Week reported Thursday. Previous investments by the VCs have included Amazon.com, Netscape and Google.
Curry and his partner, Ron Bloom, are creating a network of radio-like programs which can be downloaded to PCs and mobile players. They plan to market to their network of podcasts to advertisers, figuring that aggregating programs the result will be a large audience.
Matt Kaye, a writer for Corante Web logs, said the investments are a sure sign Podshow wants to go public. “That’s what KPCB does,” he said.
Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. is admiring of Podshow’s new backing, but wonders about a payoff.
“How you could even spend $8M to make podcasting a real business is beyond me,” he wrote on his blog. While advertising on Web pages is simple to do, he said, “Creating audio advertisements … takes time, talent, cost, and you can forget about tracking it. Making podcasts is easy, he adds, making money from them is hard.”
