Came across on Paid Content: Multimedia search engine Pluggd has raised $6 million in funding in a round led by Intel Capital, this in addition to a $1.5M first round fund.
VentureBeat reports:
Last time we covered the company, it searched only audio files. Now it searches video.
It also offers a widget to search audio and video on third-party sites.
Other companies offer competing technology, but none distribute the same heat-map precision features. One is YuMe, of Redwood City, Calif., which also uses speech-recognition technology to allow advertisers to decide which videos to advertise on. That company employs people in India to make sure that videos are about what they say they are. It has received more than $7 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, and BV Capital and others. Another is EveryZing, which raised $10 million in June.
On the one hand, yes, video search is nowhere near a mature market, it’s very early stage, but it’s extremely crowded.
Read: Has the “Bubble Pocket” Moved from Video Sharing Sites to Video Ad Networks? where we also look at video search engines who are trying to be the next Google. I think everyone understands there will never be another Google because it benefited from a unique macro circumstance: little investment in competing search engines and new search technology due to the dot com crash and a unique micro opportunity: Yahoo!, the world’s largest portal, featured it. It also turned the anemic display, CPM ad market into an opportunity by offering CPC-priced text links…
The problem is that many of these technologies have no distribution, no ad revenue (Pliggd runs Ad Sense, for example) yet they base their current valuations on Google-esque comparables. That is a recipe for disaster. Even Yahoo!, MSN, Ask and AOL have tiny market shares, and we’ve looked at the respective values of those business before.
And, there are already many sites with large traffic and audiences who deploy some for of video search, we know that technological superiority is not perfectly positively correlated with market share.
Of the hundreds of companies in this space, ultimately a couple will be acquired, a couple will be successful as standalone businesses, but for the remaining 90+, it will be pretty much a black hole sucking out VC money.
After all, the likelihood of any of these sites reaching critical mass is slim to none: if you wanted an indication of that, ask yourself why sites launch these days with misspelled names, who, on earth, will get Pluggd right when they enter it in a browser’s address bar. I know what you’re thinking, it’s not about the destination, it’s about [insert what you will here].
But, you proved my point. The only exit is the wishful thinking that someone will buy you, which is fine, but it is dangerous.
Disclaimer: we run MetaMojo.com, a meta video search engine, so technically, services like Pliggd are sources we could query.
Previously:
- Truveo Focuses on Consumer, Again
- Right now, Powerset is all about PR
- Powerset and Podzinger/Everyzing are a match made in heaven?
- veZoom Launches in crowded space
- Google: Search, Video, Advertising
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