Mode Media crosses a billion video views in charge to be FB and YouTube alternative

Mode Media, the company that offers a video-heavy hub for professional content producers, announced today that it streamed more than 1 billion videos views and had 25 million unique visitors in August.

The August data is the most recent available from ComScore.

Mode, which launched its video platform six months ago, now ranks No. 6 among video-streaming platforms for video creators. However, Mode can be considered No. 3, behind only YouTube and Facebook, if you count only platforms that allow video creators to make money from advertising, according to Mode CEO Samir Arora.

In particular, Mode’s video series “100 Years” has achieved viral success. It has gotten more than 250 million total video views to date. The first episode, called “100 Years of Fashion in 2 Minutes,” has become the most viewed fashion video ever, with more than 175 million views, the company said.

The company says it has its own secret sauce, including its own video technology, which it hopes to turn into the leading alternative to Facebook and YouTube. Media companies like BuzzFeed have achieved significant size, but they rely almost entirely on those companies to stream video. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but Facebook has been known to change its feed algorithms, and so BuzzFeed could potentially be affected if Facebook decided to rank its content lower in its algorithm for some reason.

Mode, by contrast, owns its own video technology and streams the majority of its video via its own platform, with only a minority going through Facebook or YouTube. The company creates video and “seeds” it with select members of Mode’s 10,000 paid “curators.” It does this using data about which curators have responded most effectively to what content in the past. Each of the curators have their own point of view, user base, social ranking, and reach.

Second, the company monitors how the video is spreading from those seeding efforts and continues to seed with other curators based on their similarities to ones seeing the most effectiveness. The company determines the types of people — by demographics or other interests — who are most interested in the content and then takes a series of steps to promote it to them, including paid distribution.