Thursday, August 24, 2006

Video Sites On the Brink

The next year will be critical for online video as two riddles will be resolved -- which companies will survive the shakeout, and what will be the business model. While videos will become standard fare on many websites, a bust is also likely.

lists the top 5 most likely video sites to be acquired.

Viacom needs a video search engine more than any of the other publishers mentioned. MTV with its music videos (hello!), youthful audience who love Jackass and Punk'd style of humor, is the perfect demographic, and they should buy one of these guys asap.

YouTube has the biggest audience while Blinkx, with its content deals and advertising in place, is the most likely to turn a profit quickly. While most video searches will be ad-supported, someone will figure out a way to charge a monthly fee for unlimited video searches.

I'm not so sure of the long term prospects of the other video search engines, as eventually people will want to standardize, and the market can't support so many options. Revenue from video search will be substantial, but the publishers on the market had better get themselves bought soon, because while there is money to be made, it's not enough to merit all the hype.

Posted By John Gartner at 02:43 PM
Permanent Link: Video Sites On the Brink | Comments (3)

(3) Comments on Video Sites On the Brink

I also work with other Online Video sites that are much smaller and more B2B such as TheNewsMarket, who is a client of mine. I just got done doing a Competitive Analysis of Online Video sites and guess what I found - a lack of branding. In a way, that makes sense as most of the content of a video site is what is uploaded to the site - perhaps the online video viewer is where the main branding comes in as Google Video's viewer looks different than YouTube's viewer even though the function exactly the same.

Also, many of the Online Video sites, while they can function as search engines, themselves, don't do well in organic search results due mainly to the technology used to build the sites are often not search friendly.

Comments by webmetricsguru : Friday, August 25, 2006 at 12:32 AM

With Hollywood being in a state of disruption, video sites are going to be bought up if they have any quality to them at all.

Sony Picture Entertainments recent purchase of "Grouper" is a case in point. While Grouper has grown fairly quickly, it still has only 8 million unique users which Sony figured was worthe the $65 million price they paid for it.

Of course if it continues growing, it could possibly end up being a bargiain if anybody can find a way to monetize video sites without using their core users.

In the end, that's the problem that video sites have.

Comments by Gary Bourgeault : Friday, August 25, 2006 at 01:00 AM

And what about the producers of the content themselves? Don't forget that the reason people come to the sites is to see the content that's there...

The business model also should include revenue sharing with the content producers.

Comments by JC Weatherby - YouTube User... : Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 04:14 PM

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