Online-chat and content-sharing provider��Meebo is closing a $25 million round of funding led by Khosla Ventures, the company confirmed, as investors try to muscle in on every aspect of the burgeoning social networking space.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Meebo currently reaches 180 million unique users monthly through its a4��Aone-stopa4��� hub of social networking and chatting network.

It has also created a a4��AMeebo Bar,a4��� which appears at the bottom of websites searched and then routes users to specific brands that match their past preferences and searches.

Once there, the average user spends 60 seconds looking at one of Meeboa4��a4�s 8,000-plus publisher partners, nearly double the amount they would spend watching a traditional television ad.

The recent funding news coincides with the companya4��a4�s launch yesterday of a new browser extension called the Meebo MiniBar, which will be more general than the Meebo Bar and let users share when they check in to websites, but not which particular page they are on or what they are doing.

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg told All Things Digital, which originally broke the news pre-announcement, that 87 percent of the companya4��a4�s advertisers in 2009 returned in 2010, with the Meebo Bar achieving a 1 percent click-through rate. Advertisers on average doubled their budgets after that first year with the site.

That a4��Acatch alla4��� rate has been making Meebo a prime target for venture capital shops searching for already overachieving startups and impressed by a site which has locked down more than $60 million since its launch in 2005.

&''We&'re really excited to be working with Gideon, Vinod and the rest of the team at Khosla,&'' Sternberg told VentureBeat. ��&''When we sat down with them, we truly had a meeting of the minds when talking about where Meebo is headed with web check-ins.�� We think there is huge potential to navigate the entire Web by people.&''

Sternberg also told TechCrunch that he puts Meeboa4��a4�s success down to a4��Abuilding a product for normal people, not Silicon Valley,a4��� and added that the company is tackling the discovery problem much more efficiently than past hot properties like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

a4��AI think very few things are so broad that they reach most of the users on the Internet and this is one of those,a4��� KV founder Vinod Khosla told All Things Digital.

Khosla will be joined in this round of funding by existing backers Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Meebo raised $25 million in its last round of funding in 2008.

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Tags: social networking

Companies: digg, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Khosla Ventures, meebo, Sequoia Capital, Stumbleupon

People: Seth Sternberg, Vinod Khosla

Tags: social networking

Companies: digg, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Khosla Ventures, meebo, Sequoia Capital, Stumbleupon

People: Seth Sternberg, Vinod Khosla

Riley McDermid is a contributing reporter to VentureBeat. She was previously the online editor at institutional investing and trading forum Markets Media, which she joined in 2008 from Dow Jones/MarketWatch in New York. Her work has appeared in the The New York Times, the Associated Press, Portfolio Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Barrona4��a4�s. She has won awards from the American Society of Business Publishers and Editors, the Magazine Association of the Southeast, the Mississippi Press Association and the Atlanta Press Club, and was a finalist for the Pacemaker Prize for excellence in news reporting.

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