Internet Company to Let Consumers Profit From Posted Videos - New York Times
Blinkx, an Internet video search company based in London, will allow consumers to make money from the videos they show on their own blogs, social network sites or home pages if they agree to embed advertising in the videos.
By combining two Internet trends — social networking and online video — with a moneymaking opportunity, Blinkx hopes to better compete with YouTube, the market-leading video-sharing service owned by Google, said the founder and chief executive of Blinkx, Suranga Chandratillake.
Google said yesterday that it would allow Web sites in its advertising network to use some YouTube content and share advertising revenue. In a similar vein, Revver.com, which shares 50 percent of its ad revenue with people who post videos on its site, includes its ads before and after the videos.
Blinkx, however, has until now concentrated on its role as a video search engine. The company, which was spun off from the British software firm Autonomy in May, uses speech-to-text transcription and visual recognition technology to sift through Internet videos.
On Monday, Blinkx started offering search capabilities in French, German and Spanish. It is indexing content from 200 European sources and sites with more than one million hours of non-English video content, including Eurosport, Euronews, TF1, Elmundo, Le Monde and Spiegel TV.
Under Blinkx’s new program, to be formally introduced in London today, Internet video fans can post film clips to their sites and then submit them to Blinkx to be indexed and categorized.
Each time the video is watched, the Blinkx system will choose a relevant ad from its inventory and place it in one of two places — either in a small transparent window at the bottom of the video screen or in a box outside the top of the frame.
Every time an ad is clicked, the host Web site for the video will receive a portion of the payment for the ad placement. The rate varies, based on the ad, but it is generally a few pennies for each click.
“This way, the people who are powering the video revolution are the ones who get the rewards,” Mr. Chandratillake said.
He said the choice of ad display was up to the host, adding that the ads were no more distracting than the banner ads now common on Internet pages.
Many Web sites — especially social networks like MySpace and Facebook — allow users to borrow and embed video on their personalized pages. Others, usually professional media companies like the BBC, do not.
Mr. Chandratillake cautioned that any income derived by bloggers and others agreeing to take the ads would not be much. “Maybe enough to pay your Internet bill at best,” he said.
This is the NEW SoftwareDaily. The previous version, at http://swdly.blogspot.com has been discontinued, but its archive may still be viewed. SoftwareDaily's companion blog is HardwareDaily, at http://hardwaredaily.blogspot.com.
Thursday, 11 October 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment