SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

August 11, 2008

MIVA Rejects blinkx Acquisition Offer

Last week, online video search engine blinkx, apparently feeling inspired by Microsoft, made an unsolicited bid to acquire online advertising company, MIVA.

MIVA has responded by saying Thanks but No Thanks. Here's the official word:

"After careful evaluation, the MIVA Board believes that blinkx's proposal significantly undervalues MIVA's assets, including our technology, brand recognition and network," said Larry Weber, MIVA's Chairman of the Board. "We don't believe that the proposal, as currently constituted, is in the best interests of our shareholders. The Board of Directors continues to evaluate all of MIVA's strategic options in the context of our industry and the broader business environment and remains committed to evaluating and considering offers that maximize shareholder value."

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

September 13, 2007

blinkx and Utarget partners in online video advertising deal

blinkx, the video search engine, today announced its partnership with the UK's online video advertising network Utarget, to place video advertising around its content for UK audiences. Utarget will focus on monetizing blinkx's video inventory including ITN News and ITN Celebrity.

Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of blinkx, says his company is looking to develop more geo-targeted matches between content owners and advertisers to better monetize their output, and that "working with Utarget will offer their partners the simplest way of getting in touch with UK advertisers."

“blinkx is easily the most advanced search engine for users to access video." said Phil Cooper, Utarget CEO. Partnering with blinkx will offer our advertisers quality video inventory and a large, well-informed audience.”

Exclusive: blinkx has also informed me that uTarget's ads will be pre-roll, and run before user-selected video. According to a YouGove study commissioned by Utarget Networks, UK Internet users are far more receptive to pre-roll online video advertising than U.S. internet users. Read the commentary on this story at the Grantastic Designs blog.

Posted by Grant Crowell at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 31, 2007

"Prom Queen: Summer Heat" – the blinkx interview

Grant Crowell interviews Suranga Chandratillake, founder and CEO of the video search engine blinkx, on their partnership announcement today with media studio Vuguru to exclusively broadcast the Emmy-nominated video series "Prom Queen," and on the future of professional-grade, internet-only scripted and produced video content with search.

SEW: Suranga, you mentioned in blinkx's press release that the Prom Queen series is a "pioneering format" for online video which “has proven tremendously successful in the new media landscape.” What, in your opinion, has made this series most popular with online viewers? The short length? Subject matter? Professional production quality and studio backing? Or a combination of all those things?

It's a really interesting question. I don't really know, but its proven to be immensely popular. A couple things that do work is that its just really good content; it's watchable and creative, because you have professionals at every stage – writing, acting, producing – exclusively for online viewing. And I think the short length works extremely well. It's a type of “snack mentality” that you get, which also matches the structure of the blinkx home page. So I think the physical format plus the show length has been critical for making it so popular.

One smart thing that the show producers, Vuguru, did is they picked a demographic that works online. If you look at all the stats in video, there's obvious a bias towards a younger audience – high school, college – that sort of thing. The content specifically fits that demographic. Its not to say there aren't people who are middle age or older who watch video or whatever else, but rather than try to sell a smaller audience on a certain piece of content, it makes sense to go for the audience that's already there. All of those things have helped in its success.

SEW: Do you believe this will lead to a market for more exclusively Internet-scripted/produced drama? And if so, would blinkx be featuring similar pieces from this studio? Other studios?

Yes, definitely. We think there is a great audience out there for this type of content; and we think that Vuguru has tapped into it, they've done a good job with it, and we expect there to be a lot more. You can look at what's happened at a similar video site, Funny or Die – a lot of its video content there is short-form, scripted, and with a professional background. There are other video sites that do similar things as well.

Until now, a lot of the professional or semi-professional stuff has come from Silicon Valley-style companies. You've seen things like Revision3 and so on, which is great in that it taps into the tech audience very well, but it hasn't really tapped into the mainstream audience. I think the success of Prom Queen is going to lead to a lot more people paying attention to this and doing work on this area.

SEW: Will these episodes also show up concurrently on the promqueen.tv website, or does blinkx have an exclusive “first run”?

Its concurrent (running alongside promqueen.tv), so its more of a super-distribution [through the blinkx network]. The video series will now be findable through all of the usual network sites that we power along with the blinkx video search space.

SEW: What type of advertising will this content be supported by? How will it appear on the web page?

Both blinkx and Vuguru can serve our own advertising on the content. In this case, we'll be doing short pre-roll and post-roll ads. They'll be produced in various points and various campaigns during the showing. We're also going to be showing overlay ads down the road. There's a lot of interest in overlay ads from our advertisers, so we're going to be trying them out over the next couple months.

SEW: What kind of revenue-sharing program have you worked out with Vuguru?

We will be sharing revenue with Vuguru based on the number of views.

Posted by Grant Crowell at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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