I have long been a fan of Blinkx the video search engine that, as far as I am concerned, pretty much prompted the whole genre and introduced the idea of live video search and stream done properly. So I was interested to receive word from Blinkx founder and CTO Suranga Chandratillake today that they have entered a partnership deal with Lycos.
Now usually, I admit, such news bores me senseless. But this is different, because it doesn’t involve coughing up millions to serve up web search and listings to Face Party, as Microsoft have done, or $900,000 to do the same for the 100 million odd users (and I use the term sagely) of MySpace as Google has done. Instead, in return for serving up access to 5 million hours of video content via that oh so lovely dedicated video search engine to 25 million Lycos users, Blinkx has opted for an ad revenue share model.
That is why this is so interesting because it could be the kind of deal that answers many of the monetization questions raised when dealing with a Garage TV operation. Oh, and Garage TV is another Chandratillake invention: by it he means user generated content. The point is, that a Garage TV setup can often generate a hug audience in terms of bums on seats, but prove to be very difficult to actually generate real revenue from. Of course, Blinkx isn’t the only service to understand this, and only last week YouTube were announcing that they will allow commercial brands to interact with users directly through custom channels on its hugely popular site. Warner Brothers, for example, are launching a Paris Hilton Channel on YouTube (oh glory be) in order to promote her musical career (which really does need all the promotion it can muster, in my opinion.)
Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning here not only because the ad revenue sharing concept is an interesting one for webmasters tom consider, but also so as to introduce Blinkx to anyone who might not have heard of it before. Take a look, I don’t think you will be disappointed.