When you can boast access to 12 million hours of video, then advertising executives everywhere will beat a path to your door. But the problem for video search engine Blinkx, is that until now there was the tiny problem of its selling adverts against videos that might be wholly inappropriate.
Which is why Blinkx has launched its AdHoc content addressable video advertising platform, so that all advertising will be shown alongside or within videos that are about the same or similar subjects. Add content addressability to the traditional internet advertising capabilities of having broad based economic data about each web browser, and the system is pretty compelling.
Blinkx is the most long lived of all the video search engines and although we won’t say that it’s the best, it is considerably better at finding the video type you are looking for than Google Video or YouTube. The acid test is to put in the terms like Penguin and see if it finds you Penguin Books, live Penguins or the biscuit of the same name, or even just people that walk like Penguins.
The system that AOL bought a couple of years ago, called Truveo was in our view the best system on the market, but Blinkx does a pretty good job and uses some patented technology from its previous parent, Autonomy to transcribe what is being said in a video and allow both that and any metadata such as closed captioning to also be indexed.
Back in May Autonomy exercised options it had to acquire Blinkx, joined it with some of its core video technologies from inside Autonomy and floated the company on the London Alternative Investment Market. Already the company is valued at almost $300 million and rising on the back of deals announced since.
Two weeks back Blinkx announced it will power video search at Ask.com, a subsidiary of IAC/InterActiveCorp and this week it stuck similar deals with RealNetworks and Lycos.
The RealNetworks deal is a global partnership with Blinkx providing links to the indexed content through the new RealPlayer, the first RealNetworks has launched in years, while the Lycos deal is an integration of the Blnkx search function at its search site so that video play lists can be created and stored there.
It looks like these deals and the new AdHoc advertising software were deliberately held back from the IPO so that Blinkx would have a list of neat deals to drive up its share price post IPO. We still think that if it had gone public in the US, its valuation by now would already be several billion dollars.
If Blinkx continues to apply this kind of pressure to the search engines out there, it is only a matter of time before it is acquired in a deal that makes its current share value appear a pittance.
The AdHoc platform will allows advertisers options to place adverts before a video is shown, at the end of it, in the middle or any combination of the three, as well as dynamically selecting banners, and in-video mini-banners. Partners can even select which ad databases to leverage ‘ their own, the Blinkx AdHoc platform, or external ad systems, such as Google’s AdWords.
‘Until now, online video advertising was a kind of Frankenstein’s monster ‘ an attempt to cobble together technology that was built for Text Web banner advertising and apply it to an entirely new medium ‘ the Video Web,’ said Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO, Blinkx. ‘The AdHoc platform is revolutionary because it was built from the ground up to address rich media, resulting in higher monetization for media companies, more effective marketing for advertisers and, most importantly, a useful, non-disruptive experience for users.’
Video advertising over the internet has been growing at well over 100% compared with the 35% growth for total internet advertising and the time has probably come for products like AdHoc, as long as Blinkx can attract a team of advertising sales people that can address the US market.