If, as Compete suggests, 20 million visitors is the “magical mark” indicating a website has officially arrived as a dominant force – most recent additions to this exclusive club include Digg.com and Facebook – then the folks behind AOL’s Truveo video search engine must have exchanged their old wands for Super Deluxe models.
This week, Truveo nearly hit the 40 million visitor mark, even though nobody’s mentioned it among the YouTube hysteria. The visitor measurement comes courtesy of comScore.
This may be because nobody’s buying up video search engines for billions of dollars. Truveo, though, thinks it’s time has arrived, especially in an era where copyright holders are spitting mad and YouTube has a constant legal headache.
“Last year Internet video hit the mainstream, but this year it’s consumer’s use of video search that is exploding as people look for a one-stop-shop for video,” said Timothy Tuttle, CEO and Co-Founder of Truveo and Senior Vice President of AOL Video.
“We’ve seen steady growth since we launched, but the recent 50% month-over-month growth we are now seeing represents a fundamental shift in user behavior.
“Users are realizing that their favorite video may no longer be available on video sharing sites due to copyright issues, but they can still easily find legal versions of those videos elsewhere on the Web through a video search engine.”
The company’s partnerships are also hard to ignore. Truveo powers the video search engines at Brightcove, Clevver, CSTV, Excite (is that still around?), Flock, InfoSpace, Microsoft, Pageflakes, PureVideo, Qwest, Search.com, Sportingo, Netvibes, Widgetbox, and YourMinis.
So if you can’t find what you’re looking for at any of those sites, you can blame AOL, which is always a good time.
Truveo attributes its success at gaining users to its Visual Crawler technology (and not, obviously, to its ability to close deals with heavily populated partners), and to its relationship with developers, who access to a suite of open video search AVIs.
“Video search is a critical component of that experience and is built into Flock’s upcoming 0.9 release,” said Shawn Hardin, Flock President and Chief Executive Officer. Hence, in fewer words than in his statement, why Flock likes Truveo.
Executives at Pageflakes, Widgetbox, and Goowy Media had similar wordy, press-releasy, nice but useless things to say about Truveo, but we won’t insult your intelligence any more than we have to.
