My link blog and why Blinkx didn’t get YouTube deal

by on October 11, 2006

Lots of good stuff on my new link blog (done thanks to Google Reader). I read hundreds of feeds so you don’t have to. There’s a feed here too. Everything on there is less than a day old right now, so feel free to surf through all the pages.

While I was reading my feed I saw Matt McSpirit talking about Blinkx, which is a video search engine. So, why didn’t Blinkx close the $1.65 billion deal that YouTube did?

Well, for one, the name. I can say YouTube even after drinking four beers. Now, how do you tell your friends to use Blinkx? I can’t even spell it. I had to look at the logo three times just to make sure I was spelling it right. If I can’t tell my friends about something new your growth won’t be as fast. Make sure I can say your name on radio. Or on stage when I’m talking. YouTube works. Blinkx doesn’t.

Also, the home page is WAY overbearing. Too many moving things. And one design principle I learned in college: pick ONE thing and make that twice as big as anything else on the page. YouTube wins here. Why? Because your eye needs something to enter the page with. If everything is the same size, as it is on Blinkx, your eye feels uncomfortable. Doesn’t know where to look. And instead of picking something will just leave. Dave Winer reminded me of that last night when he said he hadn’t watched any of my show because there was too much for him to pick from. He wanted a page design like Ze Frank or Rocketboom have: just one video. On my ScobleShow, I pick one video and make it bigger than the others.

Back to the home pages, Blinkx has lots of big-name videocontent. Movies. TV shows. Etc. YouTube has lots of “small-name” videocontent. Kittens. Goofy videos. We’re all looking for different kinds of content. Stuff to impress our friends with that they probably won’t have seen. Here’s a hint: your friends and family have probably already seen the latest Lost. But they haven’t seen the latest cute kitten video. Microsoft makes this mistake too (remember IE 4 with ActiveDesktop? What was there? Big name media companies. No small guys. I wonder if Microsoft will learn that it’s the small guys that make an experience different and interesting?)

It’s not hard to see why YouTube built a brand name and audience worth paying billions for. And why Blinkx didn’t.

  • Bloglines Clipo Blog (I meant to type ClipBlog, but I kinda like Clipo Blog, so I'll leave it), is still nicer IME, e.g:
    http://www.bloglines.com/blog/ajcann
  • Frans
    I think there is a demand for both big and small media. Small media grew faster with he Funniest Video syndrome, and the reality TV plague. But as there is a growing number of people who shifts from cable to the internet I think Blinkx might have a good shot. I think IMHO video on demand and designing your own programming... maybe even create programming lists and share them ala Delicious are the future. Maybe Apollo will resolve this.

    Design wise... well how many times we have said as a principle in Usability that animation will call you eyes intinctively. I think the biggest problem is how hidden the relevant content is. Since as a User I do not know it the videos are clickable or are just a marketing image representing the system.

    A much better solution would be a ready to stream a channel (initialized by the user ala YouTube) with the content encasulated in the module... let the user toggle through the videos. I really love how CNN does this with their stories.. You can see a headline to all the videos and if you select one, you can see a brief summary.

    That way the homepage becomes a channel itself, providing value and an immediate action for the user to experience the system. Then if the user wants to dig deeper he/she can.

    I always found YouTube a bit overwhelming when I got in there for the first time... and a bit uneasy with way to many choices. I always end up using the search function to navigate the site. But I am a light user.

    About the Blinkx logo... to make it readable the only thing they have to do is make the X bigger... so from Blinkx it could be read as Blink X... That is something easy to propagate, readable, sayable, learnable... :))

    In reference to the first comment. I always like to construct and not distruct.
  • I think that google just have MUCH MORE money that blinkx
  • I've just subscribed to your shared items from Google Reader. What a great feature! Seems like a good way to easily blog links to items of interest without actually have to post them on your blog yourself. Very cool. I've just started to use Google Reader from Newsgator and I think it rocks!
  • AOL's video search is best I've seen, believe it or not. I spent a couple hours yesterday comparing them. I liked Blinkx the least out of all of them. Too bad Windows Live is using it as the basis for its video search!
  • Christopher Coulter
    YouTube was all about community, and it had an audience and felt alive, everything else was geeky rot. YouTube was about the self-created and the big. Not just small vs. big, more the PARTICIPATORY mode. Heck, tons of big (copyrighted) material. Some video database search engine, is well, a search engine. Useful, but boring and dead.

    Here's what REALLY made it tho, End Users didn't have to fiddle with codec's, or file formats, it just took them and made it easy. Grandma could do it. It didn't mess with Media Player and Quicktime rot, it went FLV and avoided all that mess. And it wasn't the overmicrowaved marketed-content rot like Viacom's ifilm.com.

    YouTube finally made the larger trend of self produced videos, doable to a wide audience on the net, something they have been trying since 1999 and never really got right. And even then YouTube losing money, had no real customers per se, and needed a Google-bubble life-jacket.

    But the End User content-creational video TREND is larger than just one site...can YouTube be duplicated? Yes, if you do it right. And ORIGINAL real quality programming still has a leg, will never beat Hollywood and Burbank, but good things to be had in the niche programming mode. The next "wave" if you will, will move away from the YouTube "aggregators", to the content "producers". After awhile, the 'gosh-darn-shucks' novelty of YouTube will wear off...
  • Christopher Coulter
    PS - That awesome David Zucker video is getting HUGE play...whereas before journos with clipped wings would dump to Drudge, now it's gone video...thanks to YouTube.

    Even not run, it ran, so RNC gets the boost anyways...everyone was 'over the top', I thought it was pretty darned mild actually. But gosh, Zucker has that gift. But I woulda cast Hillary, as Madeleine Albright just doesn't have that name reco...and then people woulda REALLY screamed. NYT, Wash Post and all woulda taken bait...etc. News cycle gold.
  • I'd never heard of Blinkx until now.
  • Marta Jennings
    Hey Bob:
    Talking about video, did you see the Mark Foley video over at the Huffington Post. It's Foley typing and talking (via a web cam) to a young man over the internet.
    http://tape.cf.huffingtonpost.com/
    Also, the video I liked the best was the one you did yourself using the cheap camera.
  • Jay
    I agree that there's a lot of things moving on the blinkx page. But if it were blinkz and not youtube that got bought for $1.65b then I am sure you won't be complaining about the something as silly as the graphic on a company's web page.

    I guess it is human psychology...
  • Jay
    hmm... I couldn't even type blinkx correctly twice above.

    There you go... that proves one of your point.
  • Business names are so much more difficult these days. In my grandfather's time, you'd just paint a sign with some clever words like, "The Store," and the whole town would turn out.

    I received a joke-email yesterday that highlights the business name and internet address issue. This is just one example:

    [[4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at:
    http://www.therapistfinder.com]]

    I started a business yesterday, PRX Builder (http://www.prxbuilder.com), and even I ran into a name problem. Quite frankly, we had a different name a few weeks ago. It was either change the name or be served with a cease and desist letter. You can see which route we chose.
  • gb
    I don't see that spelling is such a big issue - del.icio.us, flickr and even scobleizer surely prove that point!
  • One of the key things that makes YouTube tick is...

    (drumroll please)

    Pirated content. Video caps of professionally-produced broadcast content, clipped, shared, and commented on. Oh yeah, and professionally produced pseudo-amateur content such as lonelygirl15.

    Most real amateur content sucks. If it were so easy to make good content, how come most of TV sucks even with the talent of well-trained, well-paid writers? 'Cause making compelling content is hard. For every Gary Brolsma or FunTwo, there are a hundred other fat guys playing, singing or dancing to bad music.

    And notably, Gary Brolsma and FunTwo weren't even trying to make good content.

    Napster 1.0 didn't make unsigned bands get discovered, it just made rich bands angry.

    Morally I believe that bits want to be free, but practically all that's happening is that the piratization of content like music means that big labels are forced to put their eggs in fewer baskets, and I'm expected to believe that Justin Timberlake is actually talented.
  • Kevin: if you think most user generated content sucks well, then, you haven't seen the Jedi Fights at http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jed...
  • Christopher Coulter
    Jedi Fights...wow, guess I will hafta chuck out LOST, Battlestar, Jericho, 4400, Desp. Housewives...

    Some 'User Generated Gontent' is good, (some!) but it's the exception over the norm. Niche narrowcasting, is more the trend, over YouTube teeth rot.
  • Bat Masterson
    People like watching so-called "amateur" videos, but that doesn't mean that such videos will drive ad revenue.
  • OK, OK, so the Jedi fights are cool... esp. for my 7-year-old... :-)
  • I think Blinkx should buy veetube.com and repostion.
  • tech guru
    blinkx is the largest video search engine in the world. YouTube is just a community web page where people share videos.

    two very different things.

    Blinkx is far better in searching videos...excellent tech and dont forget that blinkx was the first one to show youtube how to monetization works...(do your own research)

    blinkx will be taken over very soon...rumours are that google, msft, news corp are interested...
  • I agree with the last comment Blinkx.com has the technology all the big
    3 would like because metadata has run its course but Blinkx can not
    only see but hear the data so this is why the quality of searches is far
    more accurate and with 110 patents its only a matter of time before
    Blinkx will dominate online search and whoever is the luckyest to purchase
    them now will have the future in there hands.
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