Brad Greenspan, a co-founder of the media company that spawned social networking behemoth MySpace, said Thursday that he has become the majority investor in Flurl, a video search company based in Liege, Belgium.
Flurl is the second acquisition for holding company, Live Universe, which Mr. Greenspan founded in September to invest in U.S. and European video, entertainment, and social networking startups.
Flurl indexes videos from the vast universe of video sharing sites, including YouTube, Veoh, iFilm, and Metacafe, giving videophiles one place to search those sites by categories like “sexy,” “humor,” and “action.” And like content ranking site Digg, Flurl lets users rank the relevance of each video on Flurl, or from other websites via an embedded Flurl widget.
The video search site had 5.6 million unique users in September, according to comScore Media Metrix. The built-in audience gives Flurl an advantage over other players in the video search market. “There are tons of small companies out there working on video search,” said Mr. Greenspan. “This was the only property I’ve seen that has such a large audience already using the product,” he said.
With Google’s recent $1.65 billion acquisition of video site YouTube, the buzz surrounding video search is getting steadily louder. And a host of startups are joining major media players like Yahoo, AOL and Google in the race to build a better video search engine. Blinkx, a San Francisco-based video search site, uses speech recognition and visual analysis technology to compile results. El Segundo, California-based PureVideo Networks pulls feeds from video sites across the web.
“A lot of small startups are feeling the pressure to figure it out now that Google has acquired YouTube,” said Marissa Gluck, an analyst with Los Angeles-based Radar Research.
Flurl does not solely rely on RSS feeds, but also indexes media sites through manual HTML pattern matching to allow more detailed results. In addition to video, Flurl also indexes images, audio, and flash content. “As more and more video is aggregated online, the ability to effectively search through the clutter and find what you are looking for will be critical,” said Flurl CEO Rene Muyrers.
The company that figures out video search stands to reap the rewards of the growing Internet video advertising market. Rich media and video advertising is expected to begin to replace traditional banner advertising on the web, according to the Jupiter Research online advertising forecast.
In 2007, U.S. advertisers will spend $5 million on online video ads. By 2011, the amount spent is expected to grow 160 percent to $1.3 billion. While spending on text ads will continue to represent a greater part of the total online advertising market, the segment is expected to grow at a slower rate—45 percent—over the same period, according to the Jupiter forecast.
Contact the writer: AWeinstein@redherring.com
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