Focus is everything, so last year I pretty much decided to focus 80% of our energy into WatchMojo.com, because I knew that we could become a leader in the production of video programming for broadband platforms. And, I guess, we were right in that.
But of the remaining 20%,
- we spend 5% of our time on vertical search,
- 5% on our blog network (of which HipMojo.com is a part of),
- 5% on StreetMojo.com, the matching application connecting consumers looking for contests with marketers looking to promote their sweepstakes to users.
- The remaining 5%? Last year we decided to build a video meta search. It’s still very raw, but since we’re building a growing user base of video watching users on WatchMojo.com, and have developed some search expertise, it was a natural extension to have some kind of foothold in video search. Having worked in the metasearch field in 2000, I saw a lot of similarities between where text-based content search was then and where video is now.
The big idea was that there would be a lot of smart people with a lot more money than I had developing new tools, and then you had Google, Yahoo!, MSN, TW/AOL and IAC/Ask be able at any moment to flex its muscle and gain a leadership position… but, I figured, each player would develop an interesting strategy, and if we had a meta search, we could showcase them all, and since with video you send traffic out to the video search site, it would be a cleaner relationship than in text-based content meta search, where the meta search engine technically “bypasses” the underlying search engine and sends traffic directly to the end site…
Here’s Cast TV’s MO:
CastTV’s video search technology has been developed over the last few years to address the challenges particular to online video search, which are twofold:
- Online videos are increasingly hidden in the “media Web”- behind Flash, JavaScript and media player plug-ins – and therefore hidden from traditional search engines. CastTV has built unmatched proprietary technology that crawls, indexes and extracts metadata from these videos.
- Information, or metadata, associated with videos is often short, incomplete and disorganized. CastTV has developed novel search algorithms that overcome these limitations by incorporating behavioral and extended data – delivering the best results for users’ video queries.
Our video search site currently indexes a dozen of sources, here are the results for Seung-hui Cho (the Virginia shooter) for example. When we relaunch our network of sites soon, we’ll add more and make it look pretty (finally).
I look forward to checking out Cast TV, a new player that today raised $3.1M from Draper. It was announced on their site, with additional sites picking up the story.
:: See my interview with Podzinger’s CEO Alex Laats here: in “Powerset and Podzinger: Match Made in Search Heaven?”
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