ValueClick Display Advertising

Pixsy now indexes Flash Video

Ok, everyone keeps talking about indexing flash video and what a big deal that is and how hard a problem it is to solve, etc, etc. In the course of building the biggest image and video search distribution business on the web we got tired of hearing this, so we did it:

http://pixsy.com/search.aspx?pid=290 (flash video from the CBS Innertube site)

Pixsy Celebrity Search Widget

Pixsy's new search widget that can be customized to the content of any site:

Wall Street Journal Article on Video Search

A recent article on video search included a snapshot review of Pixsy.  The first part of the article discuss PureVideo, a great company with a new meta video search engine.  What they forgot to mention was that PureVideo uses Pixsy for some of their popular video content in this new video search engine.

Monaco Media Forum

I'll be speaking at the Monaco Media Forum this month on a variety of topics including the Future of Search. Pixsy will also be making a very big product announcement at the show. Here's a hint: it's called "PixsyPower".

prediction: search becomes save

as more content moves it's way online, and as more people become better used to accessing the internet for information and entertainment, there becomes a point where too much content is available (like today). At this what matters is spending less time searching for material and more time enjoying/accessing that material. This mean that the function of search becomes the funcation of save and that personalization/preferences coupled with push/pull technology become the tools for accessing/receiving information/entertainment. To dumb this down a bit: myYahoo! is the most important product in Yahoo!'s stable of products today.

Digital Hollywood

fantastic show, Vic has done a great job. probably the best networking event of any tech trade show.

TheDeal Convergence 2.0 in NYC

TheDeal put on a great event yesterday called Convergence 2.0 at The Museum of Television and Radio in NYC. Some great speakers including Mel Karmazin and Leo Hindery.

Leo described a power shift from the portals (AOL, MSN, Yahoo, eBay) to Content Providers (since they control the content) in the next few years and that their control over these markets is detoriorating. One thing Leo forgot to mention is that the portals are in control because they have aggregated eyeballs (e.g. traffic), which the content providers do not. In order for this shift to happen the content providers need to have massive traffic. However, there are and will be only so many "access points" to content on the web. Those who control the main access point to aggregated content will ultimately be the winners.

Perhaps the most interesting panel was with Scott Kurnit, Neal Goldman of Inform.com, and Dennis Miller of Spark Capital on the nature of entrepreneurship and the qualities required to build something from scratch. Neal was eloquent on this topic pointing out the determination and resilience required to "stay tough" in the early stages and Dennis noted that many entrepreneurs are borderline insane/manic (which I'm sure many Pixsy employees can attest to).

Under The Radar - 6.14.06

We're looking forward to presenting at Debbie Landa's impressive Under The Radar event this coming Wednesday on the Microsoft campus. We had a good reception at the last event and look forward to unveiling more of our progress at this one.

"Advertiser Blend"

My theory is there's a bit of a backlash among Google AdSense users - they enjoy the monetization that AdSense supplies, but are increasingly frustrated with the lack of visual appeal of their ads and the lack on "blend" into their site content. There is an industry-wide trend occuring today called "Advertiser Blend" - this refers to online publishers that not only want great monetization from their ad providers, and, unique visual content that blends into their site content. Getting both of these in the same ad unit represents the next major wave in online ad growth.

Nielsen//NetRatings Study on Image Search

Nielsen//NetRatings reported on 3.30.06 that image search is the fastest growing search vertical on the web:

"Among search verticals, image search enjoyed the strongest year over year growth in February,
increasing 91 percent. “Increasing broadband penetration, which allows users to download large image files easily and efficiently, and the rising popularity of social networking sites have contributed to the increase in image searches. In the upcoming year, we can expect to see an increase in video searches as video clips become as commonplace on the Internet as still images."

The entire report can be found here.

The Visualization of the Web

People consume more information visually than when reading text, which means that most online information gathering will ultimately become visual in nature.

Business models like Pointcast will be returning in a big way in the near future - consumers don't want to spend hours and hours online looking for a specific piece of information. They're fine with that today because the web is such a new discovery tool; however, this will wane as quality and speed of information delivery becomes most important. MyYahoo is essentially a web-based Pointcast without the download and alert functionalities.