ON24 Inc. is a San Francisco-based company that markets products and services based upon webcasting and virtual events technology. The privately held company has primary venture capital investors that include Gold Hill Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, and Rho Ventures.
The company was founded in 1998 under the name Newsource with an initial idea to become a distribution center for Internet-based video press releases.
In 1999, the company changed its name to ON24 and changed its focus to being an online financial news streaming media source. The company hired Mitch Ratcliffe to form a news team based in San Francisco. ON24 News became the first news operation to provide on-demand streaming audio and video news product made specifically for an Internet audience. The news team produced more than 79,000 audio and video news reports of between 1 minute and three hours in length. Viewers were able to subscribe to news based on the specific companies in which they invested or by industry sector. Each viewer's stream was customized based on their preferences, a mode of delivery that remains unique.
At its height in 2000, the ON24 News staff numbered more than 100 with international reporters in cities such as New York, London and Tel Aviv. Its content was syndicated to various financial portals such as Merrill Lynch, E-Trade and the Nasdaq trading floor. On August 1, 2002, ON24 shuttered its news operation, citing a lack of interest in Internet-based financial news in the wake of the dot-com bust.
In 2003, ON24 introduced a web-based video publishing platform that enables users to self-produce live and on-demand webcasts. ON24 Webcast Center has been adopted across the publishing, medical education and enterprise sectors. ON24 enters 2006 with 20 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, a customer list featuring some of the world's largest companies, and the experience of producing more than 100,000 successful webcasts.