Video search-and-ads firm Blinkx nearly doubled its income last year – but ongoing product costs left it with another significant loss.
Suranga Chandratillake’s Blinkx is well-positioned in the fast-growing space – it’s got 720 content providers, its video searches are up 169 percent to 22.6 million a day and the number of brands advertising through its AdHoc system grew 112 percent.
So revenue grew 142 percent to $33.6 million in the year to March 31. But London-listed Blinkx still recorded an $8.5 million loss (only about $300,000 better than last year) because expenses grew 15 percent to $10.6 million.
Things are evening out, though – in the second half of the year, Blinkx slowed its expense outgoings significantly, and saw revenue 60 percent up from the first half.
Blinkx inked a deal to power Ask.com’s video search last year, and it added targetability to its AdHoc system in the last few weeks.
If web video advertising continues to trend up, then Blinkx is certainly amassing enough scale to be a key player in the long term, and one can still envisage it becoming an attractive M&A property to a larger media or search operator – but it will want to see income exceed outgoings to get there.