A University of Bath student who developed a video
streaming website two years before YouTube has sold his business
for £630,000.
Kieran O’Neill, aged 19 from Winchester, set up the
HolyLemon.com website in 2003, when he was
taking his GCSEs, to show friends the Flash animations he
created.
As word of the site began to spread, he started streaming
user-generated funny video clips submitted to the site – well
before YouTube was established on the market.
O’Neill then began marketing the site and drawing revenue from
advertising sales, making it profitable.
HolyLemon.com soon had more than 50,000 users per day and became
established as Google’s first-ranked website for the search term
“funny videos”.
In March 2007, HolyLemon.com had more than 1.1 million unique
visitors. Over the last year, O’Neill has refused several offers
for the business, including an approach from Brad Greenspan, one of
the early investors in MySpace, and other US companies keen to
expand into the European market.
But O’Neill has now accepted an offer from Handheld Entertainment after
spending three weeks at the company headquarters in San Francisco.
They impressed him with their vision for the company.
O’Neill now holds shares in the parent company and has a
sizeable amount to invest in two ventures he is currently working
on.
“With exams, I haven’t really had time to celebrate yet,” said
O’Neill, who is a second year BSc Business Administration student
in Bath University’s School of Management .
“I designed the early sites in my bedroom at home and the trick
was learning how to effectively stream user-generated video clips
through the browser.
It is what you see everywhere now, but then it was a really
novel idea, particularly for humour websites,”
said O’Neill.
O’Neill said, “At the time of its launch I remember seeing
YouTube and thinking that it was good – this was back when my site
was 10 times the size.
“YouTube’s success came through a widget that allowed people to
distribute their own video content – but then they have had a team
of developers and a lot of money to get it where it is today,” he
said.
Google bought YouTube last October for a more sizeable $1.65bn
(£868m).
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