Video site Blinkx lost $3.26 million (£2.07 million) between April and September – fairly hefty, but far less than the $12.8 million (£8.14 million) loss recorded in the same period last year, when the company was spun off from Autonomy and floated on London’s AIM market.
What started as just a video search index has added a glut of products this year – a white label video gallery for publishers, a TV guide for third party online video, 3D video and BBTV, its own online streaming TV app that it converted to a web service within just a few months of launch.
That might sound like over-proliferation of products, but it’s grown revenue from $2.9 million (£1.84 million) in the period last year to $6.4 million (£4.07 million) this time around. Gross profit more than doubled from $2.18 million (£1.38 million) to $4.5 million (£2.86 million) but the company sank much more money in to R&D and sales and marketing. The latter is working; Blinkx says it now has video library from over 420 producers and claims a 681 percent annual UK traffic increase.
In contrast to Blinkx’s usual proactive marketing approach (press releases for those new media partners come at a rate of knots), CEO Suranga Chandratillake said the economic outlook now demands “a conservative view”, heeding “pressure on advertising reported by major players in the market“. For all the new product releases, Blinkx’s core is its AdHoc video ads platform, which, at this nascent stage in the video advertising paradigm, will hope for an upturn in advertising forecasts.
But Chandratillake remains confident: “We have taken a conservative view of the macro situation and balanced that against the strong growth of the online video market. We therefore believe that, in spite of the current macro-economic conditions, we expect Blinkx to be able to report continued strong growth in the second half and beyond.