Blinkx Posts Earnings, Talks About Its Search Future

by Gavin O'Malley, May 19, 2009, 3:20 PM

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Seeing continued growth, video search company Blinkx reported 113% year-over-year revenue growth -- or $13.93 million -- on Tuesday. But, while narrower than ever, marketing and R&D costs still led to a full-year loss of $8.87 million.

"It's slow and steady, but we're happy with those numbers considering that YouTube is estimated to be making something like $100 million a year," Blinkx chief executive Suranga Chandratillake told Online Media Daily.

2009, according to blinkx, is "a year of tremendous potential," and it plans to continue investing in the present "once-in-a-generation opportunity" of online video.

Still, in light of present market conditions, the company said it was maintaining a "cautious and conservative stance."

Marketing spend nearly doubled to $13.9 million, while R&D spending grew to $4.2 million, administration costs were up to $1.8 million.

Since its launch in 2004, blinkx's reason-for-being has been to develop an efficient, scalable way to search the millions of hours of video now flooding the Web.

Blinkx presently indexes some 35 million hours of video, and offers the search service to white-label partners as well as to its own site, while its AdHoc system lets producers place ads in their videos.

According to blinkx, monthly unique visitors to its site are up 56% to 88 million; 8.5 million searches are served daily; and its video ad CPMs are holding steady at $16.25 in the downturn.

Employing technology that "listens" to the speech track of a given video, blinkx videos are now accompanied by speech tags to complement text meta-data tags. As such, users can now find videos by specific spoken words, and then jump to the exact point in the videos when those words are uttered.

Blinkx's facial recognition technology identifies and catalogs recognizable faces within videos, and presents users with thumbnails of the different faces that appear in a given video.

In addition, blinkx's technology detects scene changes, and matches videos that share similar visual components. For example, news videos on the presidential inauguration might come from different television networks, but if they share similar scenes from the event, then blinkx presents the videos as a set of related results.

Earlier this month, blinkx signed a technology integration deal with interactive service provider Miniweb. Under the terms of the deal, Miniweb is using blinkx's software for video search, targeting and personalization as part of its online services platform.

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