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Blinkx targets money-hungry video sharers

Embed video, insert ad, satisfy greed

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Blinkx wants your help as it works to generate some cold hard cash from the worldwide obsession with online video. And it's willing to slip you a cut.

Today, the Anglo-American video search engine unveiled a widget that lets you slap text ads on videos embedded into your website or blog, and when you do so, you get 50 per cent of the profits.

"If you're already putting videos onto your site or whatever else, it's an integral, totally-codeless way to generate revenue," CEO Suranga Chandratillake told The Reg.

Of course, you may have little interest in generating revenue from embedded videos. You may prefer to keep them ad-free.

The widget is based on the company's AdHoc platform, which analyzes video content in an effort to place relevant ads. Blinkx has used the technology on its own site since June, and now it's giving end users a crack.

To use the widget, you'll have to set up an account with Blinkx as well as PayPal. PayPal is how you get your cut. With those two accounts in place, you can shuttle embedded video code from sites like YouTube and MySpace into the widget, and it will spit out new code that includes an ad. "It gathers information about the video itself and finds ads to match,' Chandratillake explained.

Slap the new code onto your site, and you've got a new revenue stream. Each time someone clicks on the ad, a Blinkx partner forks over some dough, and you get half. Revenue will vary from ad to ad. "We use different ad networks, and different networks pay different amounts. So anything from one cent per click to five or 10 dollars."

When Blinkx showed us the widget in action, ads were laid across the top of video, but at some point, you'll have the option of placing them just above or beside the image. "Our tests have shown that you get more clicks with [overlays]," Chandratillake said, "so we're going to suggest that people who want to generate lots of revenue they should place the ads in the video."

So it all depends on how greedy you are. ®

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Latest Comments

Firefox will fix this!

So bring on the BlinkXBlock extension for Firefox that will fix this one. Simply parse the code that's coming from BlinkX, extract the URL of the original video with a simple regex, and replace the BlinkX URL in the page with the original one.

Might even program this baby up myself for the benefit of 'Fox users everywhere!

$action = GetCoat("Steve Roper", localtime(time));

CallTaxi($action);

exit;

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Overlay

The embedded ads from Blinkx be inside the frame while the new embedded ads from Google are above the video and inside it.

Seems at some point you may have 2 advertisers, a site host and the content creator all invovled in adverts for one video. Each overlaid on top of each other or in addition around the edges.

Time for some automated real time overlays that will user a blur filter from vdub to make it less unsightly or just black it out.

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Greed?

I assume you will video up the place as soon as possible then. Anyway it's not greed it's need slim profit potential on most sites require any and all avenues be exploited fully I would expect you to know that we still have to eat and drink heavily don't we. If it gets too unsightly you can cut back unlike what happens currently with ad servers.

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