Live streaming startup YouNow, Inc. has raised $15 million Series C in a round co-led by existing investors Venrock and Oren Zeev that included new investor Comcast Ventures.

Founded in 2011, YouNow allows users to stream themselves online while others comment on what they are saying, or in the company’s official spin they are “proud to provide a product that fuses the experience of broadcasting, gaming, performing and social networking, giving direct power to the people and enabling them to discover and create new kinds of interactive content in real-time.”

Social is where the service is trying to pitch itself as being different to its competitors, with the company telling TechCrunch that it is a network that focuses the attention on broadcasters and facilitates an intimate interaction with them and delivers high engagement numbers with more than 70 percent of users interacting through chat, voting and gifting; the latter may be of interest as a defining feature as the site seems to be more focused on building up a performer roster like YouTube, complete with the ability for those performers to be given gifts or make money through other opportunities.

Numbers for the site are impressive, with the company saying they serve over 100 million user sessions a month and over 50,000 hours of new live-video content created every day; users are also said to engage with the site longer that other sites with an average video coming in at 20 minutes and an average user spending around 51 minutes per day on the platform.

“YouNow has struck a chord with young audiences who crave and are increasingly willing to pay for real-time video-based interactivity.  YouNow’s virtual goods economy is enabling the most dedicated creators to build rewarding careers on the social network, based entirely on their talents,” Managing Director at Comcast Ventures Sam Landman said in a statement.

Web 2.0 redux?

If you’ve been around on the web long enough live streaming services are far from new, with many coming before in the mid to late 00’s including Livestream, Inc., Justin.tv, Inc, Yahoo Live Stream and a few others as well.

Fast forward to 2015 and the same thing is occurring in the space again, from Periscope, Inc., Meerkat, Inc., Blab, and others including Google’s YouTube and even Facebook, Inc., although the latter at the moment is only experimenting with live streaming from celebrities.

Everyone wants a slice of the back-from-the-near-dead live streaming space, but can the various competitors currently pitching for eyeballs all survive, because they certainly didn’t last time.

YouNow is clearly going for the youth market, and maybe that’s a unique niche they can carve out, but then again they aren’t without serious competition for those same users.

Including the new round YouNow has raised $41 million to-date.

The company did not say what it intended to use the new funding for.

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