Paris-based Adtech startup Octoly has raised a $1.2 Million Series A from Otium Capital, HiMedia Group & a series of business angels, the company reported this month. Octoly, which connects fashion brands with a longtail of YouTube fashion vloggers, says it is already monitoring over 800,000 channels producing 1 million daily views, and hopes to take a model embraced by the Top 50 YouTube stars and spread it across the longtail of up-and-coming vloggers.
Octoly is looking to take advantage of the desire by fashion brands to touch millions of users by using the largely adopted ‘product placement’ strategy that has seen YouTube stars circumvent YouTube’s advertising network in favor or their own, direct partnerships. While there’s no telling whether YouTube will crack down on this or not, for now it doesn’t seem to pose too big a threat to Google’s model, and they’re hardly the company to step in and want to take control over a premium advertising service – that’s just not their style.
My only concern was that, for the time being, Octoly doesn’t seem to be paying the vloggers it works with – free stuff, it seems, is enough of an incentive for amateurs, but I’m not sure this will stay the case as some of those vloggers grow, and as Octoly continues to want to work with them.