The buzz is that Indian YouTube clone MeraVideo (’mera‘ means ‘my’ in Hindi) is getting VC funding in tune of $1.5 million. Pete Cashmore in Mashable thinks that it doesn’t deserve the money.

Why? According to him these are the following reasons:

a) The site receives 12,000 ‘hits’ a day which isn’t too much for a social network,
b) The site using a $300 off-the-shelf script from a company called Alstrasoft.

My point is, if an obscure YouTube like Grouper can go for $65 million to Sony why not MeraVideo? Besides, if the site is getting about 12,000 pageviews, it is pretty OK by Indian standards given that the only now we can see some sort of visibility in the Web 2.0 sphere. Given the enormous population and diverse vernacular background of Indian population, if it can cater to regional public, it can be a super-hit site with Indians.

Coming to Cashmore’s second objection is the $300 script. As many startups start with little or no money, a $300 script which is equivalent to around 13,500 Indian rupees in terms of exchange rate and around $2,100 in buying capacity is a fair amount of money to go for a workable script initially.

Things may be cheap in India, but if you compared small YouTube clone acquisitions for obscene amounts of money, then $1.5 million is peanuts. If MeraVideo does it act slightly differently then the potential VCs would know that they clinched a killer of a deal. However, having said all that, all this dream may evaporate in thin air if not handled properly. In any case, $1.5 million isn’t too big an amount to bet.

One should not jump the gun just yet.