Tremor Media Raises $18 Million For Web Video Ads
Web video ad network Tremor Media has raised $18 million in series C financing. — Meritech Capital Partners led the round. Previous investors include Canaan Partners, Masthead Venture Partners, and European Founders Fund.
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2009, web video was still fighting to prove itself as a brand-advertising medium, and independent ad networks were the infrastructure layer making TV-style reach sellable online. This $18 million Series C — led by Meritech with all three prior backers (Canaan Partners, Masthead Venture Partners, European Founders Fund) returning — was a bet that the network model could survive both the ad recession and the pull of publisher-owned platforms.
That bet paid out along a consolidation path this site has tracked since: within two years, Tremor's merger with ScanScout created a web video ad player sized against Hulu's own network, while rival Adap.tv raised $20 million months later. The category these rounds seeded eventually produced far larger raises for adjacent layers — creative tooling like VidMob and cross-platform measurement like VideoAmp.
First-order effects
- Tremor Media gets growth capital to expand its in-stream video ad network at the depth of the ad downturn — a signal insiders (every prior investor re-upping) saw inventory demand holding up where display was collapsing.
Second-order effects
- Well-funded independents force publishers and agencies to treat third-party video networks as real distribution, prompting rivals to raise aggressively too — Adap.tv followed with its own round within two years.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that follows from this funding class is consolidation into scale players (Tremor-ScanScout) plus specialization around them: separate venture-backed layers for ad creation (VidMob) and audience/measurement across TV and digital (VideoAmp), rather than one vertically integrated winner.
The trend: Venture capital persistently funds each layer of video advertising as TV budgets migrate online — first networks, then tools and measurement — with scale achieved through consolidation rather than any single platform winning outright.