The AdView online video management system allows content developers, such as the creators of popular American television show, ``Gossip Girl,’’ to analyze how much to their products are converted to related Web videos and seen around the world. / Korea Times.

New Search Technology Set to Bring About Google-Style Ad Revenue Creation

By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

Online video ranks among the greatest Internet developments ever, but it has yet to offer Web sites lucrative sources of income.

Internet companies, even the Google-backed Web video king YouTube (www.youtube.com), have managed to monetize only a miniscule part of their content, unable to sustain the Herculean efforts required for reviewing the massive bulk of materials for copyright violations.

Now, a Seoul-based tech company claims to be providing a solution in a Web search program that it touts as video search’s Google.

Enswers says its Web video search engine, EnswerMe (www.enswer.me), is the first of its kind to successfully search video based on image fingerprinting technology, or as company officials put it, ``video DNA.’’

EnswerMe has so far indexed more than 87 million videos and the number is expected to hit the 100 million mark soon, as it adds around 500,000 new videos per day.

Building around the efficiency of EnswerMe, the company has also rolled out a content management platform called AdView, which enables copyright holders to track video clips uploaded in sites around the world and review their generated traffic.

The program, currently in the closed-beta phase, could mark an important start in developing successful business models for user-generated videos, Enswers said, with Web sites finally securing the ``ratings data’’ that will allow them to generate revenue from advertising.

The room for growth is evident. User-generated video accounts for more than 40 percent of streams on the Internet, but only 4 percent of total online video revenue, according to a recent study by The Diffusion Group.

``We are getting a lot of interest from advertisement firms and content developers … many of them are test using AdView and our other products and they seem clearly impressed about the level of technology we are providing,’’ said Enswers spokeswoman Lee Mi-na.

``AdView will allow the creator of a popular television show to find out how many related video clips are consumed around the world on different Web sites, how many videos contain the same content and the number of hits. The program will also enable the company to automatically attach related advertisements to the video clips and request site operators to delete unlicensed videos with a simple mouse click,’’ she said.

Conventional video search services provided by Internet companies are basically an extension of text search, as their functions are based on the text data underlined in the video files.

EnswerMe is a completely different animal, as it indexes videos based on image recognition technology, which also allows it to tell which videos contain the same content and cluster them together.

AdView further advances the commercial potential by allowing advertisers improved accuracy in targeting their advertisements in Web videos and analyzing their effectiveness.

Advertisers have been reluctant to touch user-generated videos, with their inconsistent quality, and the growing amount of illegal and pirated content limiting the prospects of revenues.

With AdView providing a better way to manage such content, non-professional Web videos could finally get their chance to become a business, Lee said.

``The technology is all about analyzing video signals down to the bit-rate level _ the search engine breaks down video images by five frames per second to identify the video’s DNA, and if the video images overlap by just 10 seconds, we can track the location of that video clip wherever it is,’’ Lee said.

``AdView can also tell whether the video clips has English subtitles, and even whether the images were copied from the original file or uploaded after recording in a camcorder.’’

In a test run for video clips related to ``Beethoven Virus,’’ a popular television series by MBC aired last year, AdView showed that the videos were exceptionally popular on some China-based sites, judging from the number of hits and links.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr