Blinkx targets money-hungry video sharers

Embed video, insert ad, satisfy greed

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 10th October 2007 19:44 GMT

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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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