Traffic To Blinkx Soars

blinkx, the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine, today announced that it has broken into the top 10 most popular video sites, according to a recent Nielsen VideoCensus report of video usage in the U.S. Ranked by video streams for July 2009, the short list also includes top industry brands YouTube, Yahoo!, MSN, MTV, and CNN.

In addition to a ranking of top online video brands, Nielsen’s survey recorded significant growth in online video usage overall. According to the report, there has been a 31% increase in the number video streams since last year, and a 42% growth in time per viewer. Read more

Google To Share Revenue

Google is trying to buddy up to major media conglomerates with a new strategy, according to some reports. Blog TechCrunch says Google has decided to share advertising revenue with owners of videos posted on its YouTube property, even if they are not the ones uploading them.

The idea is that if a consumer posts video content from a TV show, then any ad revenue that YouTube generates from that clip will be shared with the legal rights holders of that video content. Google would rely on its Content ID system to identify such content on YouTube.

Why would they pursue such a strategy? For Google this would be an attempt to placate other media giants who might be considering lawsuits along the lines of Viacom. But at the same time, I see it as a potentially important development for video advertising. Rather than treat the Web as a separate advertising medium, we’ve tried to re-use and match formats from other media to the Web. Banner advertising has come from newspapers and magazines, pre-roll ads from television, etc. Yet, the most successful online advertising format is search — a format that is unique to the Web, and best suited to online user behavior.

Similarly, online video syndication is a Web-only concept. Sure, there’s syndication in the TV business, but it is either content that never made it on prime time, or content that has already been on prime time for years. The idea of distributing video to multiple sites at the same time, and simply adding up viewers for advertisers, is a Web-only idea. It is also well suited to the Web. As long as detailed tracking data and analytics are available, advertisers benefit, and as long as the same revenue can be generated per view, content owners benefit.

If YouTube does go through with this new strategy, they will be taking it a step further. Not only will it not matter where users see the video, it won’t matter who actually uploads it.

Obviously, there will be concerns from content owners. There always is, when any kind of change is suggested. And advertisers will want to know who exactly is watching and if there is a difference between a viewer at one site or version and another. If these issues can be resolved — and they should be — then we could be moving into a far more open and disruptive stage of video distribution.

YouTube Cracks Down On Hot Stuff

YouTube has started cracking down on sexually explicit content on its site, the company announced today on its blog.

The world’s most popular video sharing site said it has started implementing stricter standards for mature content. “While videos featuring pornographic images or sex acts are always removed from the site when they’re flagged, we’re tightening the standard for what is considered ’sexually suggestive,’” YouTube said on its blog. “Videos with sexually suggestive (but not prohibited) content will be age-restricted, which means they’ll be available only to viewers who are 18 or older.”

In addition, YouTube will start “demoting” videos deemed sexually suggestive and those that contain profanity from its most viewed and top favorited lists.

Also, the site will select thumbnail images for videos via an algorithm rather than auto-generating them at predefined points in a video. That will remove the possibility of gaming the system, as some creators have done by including sexy images at those predefined points to become alluring thumbnails.

Neurotrash: New Video Sharing Site

NT Media Corp, announced recently that it has completed development of the first in a series of websites that will establish the Company as an online entertainment and media provider. The site is www.neurotrash.tv and is a video-sharing site targeting young adults between the ages of 18 and 35. The Company is currently debugging and fine tuning the video sharing and social networking platform and is planning to launch the website within the next 30 days. Users are able to post and share videos on the site as well as take advantage of NEUROTRASH.tv’s video player to place videos on their own sites, social networking profile pages and blogs. NEUROTRASH.tv promotes the development of both hip content by amateur and professional videographers, and useful information channels. Extensive social networking opportunities exist on the website.

NEUROTRASH.tv is also planning a grass roots campaign to attract users by sending video crews to hip events throughout the country and providing live streams of the events. In the coming months NEUROTRASH.tv is planning to send crews to car shows, hip hop conventions and the winter music conference in Miami.

VideoSwiper: Video Embedding

One of the newest web 2.0 applications to have recently been launched on the internet is VideoSwiper a multi user, multi script mass video embedding application that works with most if not all the top video sharing community scripts.

Scripts like Clipbucket, iVidPlay, Vidiscript, PHPmotion, Social Media, Video CMS, OSTube, Vshare, Media Share Suite, PHPMelody and Clipshare to name some of the 14 currently supported.

VideoSwiper searches from 30 of the internet’s top video site and has already got over 25,000,000 videos in its database, users who own a video sharing script sign up for an account, search for media, edit and manipulate the media then mass send the results directly to their websites. Read more

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