A lot of hopes are being pinned on video search these days as the only remaining source of strong advertising growth. One of the few publicly traded pure-play Web video companies is blinkx, which trades on the London stock exchange, and just announced its half-year earnings for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2008. The company’s revenues rose 115 percent to $6.4 million for the six month period (although the comparison is only partial—see income statement below). It’s gross profit doubled from $2.2 million to $4.5 million.
Although blinkx runs its own video search engine, which is showing a nice ramp in visitors, most of the video searches that blinkx powers are on about 20 partner sites such as Ask.com, Lycos, some Microsoft sites, and Viacom’s AddictingClips. Blinkx indexes more than 32 million hours worth of video from 420 content partners, including most recently People.com, CBS, and Getty Images. Its syndicated video search reached 64 million people and accounted for 668 million pageviews in September, according to comScore. Blinkx is serving up 7 million video searches a day across its network. Here are some stats for the past six months from the company:
• Total searches – 1.2 billion
• Total monetizable Searches – 831 million or 71%
• Blended average CPM is $16.25 (CPMs range from $8 to $48)
In addition to powering video search, blinkx also has its own AdHoc video ad network that can place contextual ads in videos triggered by the words spoken in them. The company is ramping up that effort by hiring ad sales people, which is one of the main reasons it is still losing money. It spent $6 million in sales and marketing during the six-month period, nearly as much as it generated in revenues.
As a result, Blinkx still showed a net loss of $4.3 million. At least that is better than the $13.7 million loss for the same period in 2007 (not including IPO costs of $11.5 million). But it is still a loss. The company has $32.4 million in cash, $11 million less than it did a year ago.
A couple weeks ago, blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake was on a Beet.TV panel I co-moderated. He speaks towards the end of the video below starting at the 2:45 mark about the speech-to-text technology blinkx uses to index and search the actual spoken content of videos, and how that helps avoid a situation where video creators are gaming the search engines by putting deceptive tags, titles, and descriptions on their videos so they rank higher in search results.
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Youtube & Truveo have this market locked up. Move on…
Thats is not the model, they are a video search… They index videos (using voice to text), think of them as a GOOGLE for video, not at all the same as youTube ….
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When blinkx let users monetize videos, the percentage given out was too high. Did not take sense. Optimistic, but many a times unrealistic. Its not a huge shock to see them going down..
First of all, is it just me or is it odd to see such a young, and still less-than-profitable, company be publicly traded? Secondly, I checked their stock prices and it doesn’t seem that investors are really that excited about such amazing growth. Perhaps the world feels the same way as ispy does..
I agree with Chris.
Did the CEO tell you that the majority of revenue comes from adult content search? Type adult and your search term.
Overpriced. Another case of growing too fast for your own good.
Btw
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New Jobs. Garage Games. Infinity Ward. Funny Or Die. KickApps. Gracenote.
OVGuide and Truveo are the two sites that really do this well IMHO. Blinkx has cool technology, but having ads on the videos before establishing an organic userbase (and profit margin) is a huge deterrent.
Search technology is all about the results, not the design. Google hasn’t changed their layout in a decade or so, but the accuracy keeps it on top. If you build it (and it works), they will come.
excellent company with great tech…thanks for the article…
they are the biggest video earch engine!!
wow John, what a plug! who paid you for that?
A) The company is run horribly.
B) Their technology is all LICENSED from an enterprise search company called Autonomy, i.e. their CEO/Founder hasn’t created anything new
C) To Sally’s point the majority of revenue comes from Adult ads and content, so while they claim millions and millions of hours of video, the VAST majority is adult and YouTube replayed
get a clue pal!