Multiply Lands $16.6 Million Series B

Social network Multiply has taken $16.6 million in Series B funding. The round was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners with Point Judith Capital and Transcosmos Investments also participating.

As part of the deal ex-Chairman of Intermix Media (the original owners of MySpace) David Scott Carlick will join Multiply’s board.

Multiply previously took $6million Series A in July 2006.

Multiply is one of the older social networking sites (it launched in 2003) and has flown under the radar while first MySpace, then Facebook soared; we last covered the site in November 06. Whilst getting little attention Multiply has continued to grow, and at least according to Alexa is now more popular than Bebo, although lower than Orkut or Hi5. Like many of its competitors it appears to have carved out a strong presence outside of the United States, ranking in the top 10 sites visited by internet users in the Philippines (5) and Indonesia (9); 39% of the sites traffic comes from the Philippines.

A Peek At Didja.com: VeryFunnyAds Clone

Although “advertising as entertainment” site Didja.com is not launching until next year, the NYT has a sneak peak at what it will look like (screen shot below). The NBC Universal project is part of the yet unnamed News Corp/NBC Universal cooperative strategy against Youtube. However, New Co.’s second “major assult” on YouTube looks like more of the same, a clone of TBS’s VeryFunnyAds. It’s very similar to the TBS re-branding effort, letting users watch heaps of ads by search, ratings, and sort by various companies and countries.

That’d all make sense if New Co. was copying a successful site, but VeryFunnyAds doesn’t appear to be a resounding winner despite the 63 million clip views the site article says they delivered over the past year. That number of views suggests an average of 5 million videos streamed each month, but the viewership of the site doesn’t stack up.

After an initial bump on launch, VeryFunnyAds’ traffic has since tapered out at about 100,000 uniques per month, according to Comscore. Sixty-three million streams is a lot of traffic for an audience that size, especially since they don’t allow off-site video embeds. Heavy.com, whose network generated about 6 million streams in April has about 5.2 million uniques per month. If the numbers are true, it appears TBS’s site is at most attracting a small cadre of ad fanatics.

Contrary to the “advertainment” meme going around, it doesn’t look like it has legs.