The online video age, with the eye-popping Google/YouTube acquisition serving as an initial punctuation, is not going away. The popularity of this growing industry is only going to increase, especially once the movie industry picks up their feet and catches up with the vloggers. Case in point, there have been a few ccurrences in the last couple of days that illustrate this point nicely:

First off, the founder of MySpace has decided he’d to try his luck in the online video arena. That’s right, Brad Greenspan has acquired a majority stake in Flurl.com, a video search engine with an impressive page view count of over 100 million a month, according to Comscore. Don’t let anyone say that Greenspan isn’t trying to strike when the iron is hot. Perhaps if Flurl is sold to a Google or Yahoo, he’ll be able to benefit more than he did from the Fox/MySpace purchase. Read more about Greenspan/Flurl partnership here.

Flurl.com isn’t the only video site making news. PureVideo Networks, which two video sites catering to specific video tastes as well as a meta video search, announced the relaunch of StupidVideos.com, a humor video site with a well-stocked index. StupidVideos.com was redesigned to feature a new look; a larger video player; content channels; and improved search and browsing capabilities. The developers made a point to explain their improved browse function, indicating it was the one of the key improvements:

Users can explore deep within the site’s library by selecting videos that are New, Top Rated, and Most Popular and filter by Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, and All Time, as well as by categories such as Stunts, Sports, Animals, Just Plain Stupid and others. With three browse filters and improved search algorithms, users have a number of ways to access the video they want.

These changes will make StupidVideos very user-friendly, something their 5+ million unique viewers are bound to appreciate.

Finally, WebProNews’ Jason Lee Miller reported an online video story of a different variety - a honest-to-goodness vlogger spat. Ze Frank, host of a video “blog” called The Show doesn’t believe rival vlog Rocketboom’s numbers are what Andrew Baron says they are and Frank was not afraid to let his feelings be known. Frank feels Baron’s reports are inflated and that Rocketboom seems to owe their success to this number/letter combination - 38DD…

Baron did not ignore Frank’s “attack” and responded in kind with Alexa research to back up his claims. Whether Alexa is accurate or not isn’t the issue. The fact that Baron even felt the need to offer a retort is surprising however. Just continue to ride the wave started by Cogdon (which has been sustained and masterly maneuvered by Colan) and let critics like Ze Frank think what they want. Especially if you are pulling in the ad revenue you said you were at the VON Conference.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

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Tags: Online Video, Rocketboom, zeFrank, Flurl.com, StupidVideos.com

Posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 5:10 pm. Permalink