Seven years in, Revision3 and its stable of stars have more than survived the tough early days of building a video content business on the web. The San Francisco company is now bringing in a respectable 100 million video views per month, following a big 2011 — and it may be about to cash in.
It’s been working on a sale for the past several weeks, we’re hearing from multiple sources, with the acquirer being a television-based media company, The Discovery Channel. The price is between $30 million to $40 million, according to one person (in the range of what another video content company, Next New Networks, sold to YouTube for last year). The deal could close as soon as this week.
The company reported ad-based revenue growth of 53% in 2011 — albeit with no hard numbers disclosed — and a video view increase of 359%, to 800 million views. It also grew its YouTube subscriber base to more than 4.5 million people over the same period, a four-fold annual gain.
The company has also been well-supported by top tech investors, having raised $10 million in two rounds from Greylock Partners, with additional funding from Marc Andreessen and Mark Cuban.
Meanwhile, The Discovery Channel, which describes itself as the #1 nonfiction media company in the world, hasn’t had an especially strong web presence. So the match seems to make sense.