Ampush Media, an online marketing startup, has acquired Academic Earth, an online education video site that’s sort of like a “Hulu for Education” and a Bill Gates-favorite. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
As we’ve written in the past, Academic Earth is a user-friendly, curated platform for educational videos that allows anyone to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 350 full courses and over 5,000 total lectures from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface.
Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” Since the site’s launch in 2008, Academic Earth has grown to attract 400,000 unique visitors per month, primarily through word of mouth.
Gates is a big fan of Academic Earth, and even mentioned the startup in his newsletter from the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, in 2010 as an idea that could help revolutionize online education.
Ampush Media also works in the online education space, developing a technology platform that helps students identify higher education options that fit their interests. The company says it plans to invest heavily in building out social and interactive user features to Academic Earth and adding new lecture material to the site.