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Blinkx It? I Don’t Know What the Heck to Do With It!

posted on January 31, 2007


I’m with Pete Cashmore on this one. Popular video search engine, Blinkx, had launched a widget for blog owners and social networks (MySpace etc) that allows them to display relevant videos on their site.

But why?

Ok, so the videos are targeted, and the widget is not very intrusive, but where’s the benefit for me? Us? Bloggers?

I already have a number of widgets on Marketing Pilgrim – each already slowing down load times. In order to convince me to add another one, a widget needs to offer either:

  1. Some kind of revenue for me
  2. A strong value to my readers – so they’ll come back, tell others etc

I fail to see where Blinkx It meets either of these criteria. Anyone seeing a benefit, I’m missing?

UPDATE: Suranga from Blinkx stops by to let us know their plans for the new widget


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  • http://www.blinkx.com suranga from blinkx

    Thanks for the comments and for checking blinkx it out.

    To your point re the $$$, longer term, we’re absolutely looking at a revenue incentive — it’s an easy step from linking to related video to linking to related ads or commercial content. We’ve even left a few slots open to do that on the design. We’ll do this soon + if it’s what you want most, I’d be happy to put you on our beta list to try it out!

    In the short term, however, we wanted to see if the widget delivered value to bloggers (or other ‘publishers’ of other types) on its own. We’ve always believed a service has to be useful, entertaining or engaging in itself first, before we lump monetization into things.

    It’s your second point, therefore, that we’re trying to meet with the widget. Today the video web has grown to the kind of scale that means there is interesting, compelling content on most topics. Most of us, however, still have to go (out of context) from a text blog/article to go and find and watch that content on some separate video site (whether a search site, a sharing site or whatever else).

    When we released an embeddable version of our video wall last autumn we were amazed at the take-up, even though we had assumed it would appeal mainly to people directly interested in video only. It turned out (having talked to some of the thousands that embedded it) that lots of bloggers and other writers currently work primarily in ‘text’ but would love to have ways of spicing that up by adding video and other rich media into the experience they offer their readers. The wall was one way of doing it, but it’s relatively large and tied to a search, not a topic or post … it was to fill that gap that we built ‘blinkx it’.

    ie: have something that’s easy to implement, lets you give your readers the ‘video angle’ to what you’re writing about so that they are compelled to come back to your site to read more in the future.

    Thanks again for taking a look, hope that answers some of the questions.

    cheers — suranga

  • http://www.marketingpilgrim.com Andy Beal

    Thanks for the additional info Suranga. I linked to your comment from the main post.

Filed Under: Blogging, Social, Video