Video and Audio Search Engines
Everybody is asking who’s going to be the next Google. I truly think that, in terms of search engines, the next one will be a company that will be able to index the text from audio and video files.
If you’re fast (and good) you can probably write 40 words per minute, but even if you’re slow you can easily speak 100 words per minute (ok, unless you’re not guru Osho). To write a good piece of content it takes hours and sometimes, even days. But, to take 1 hour of a radio show, automatically transcript and index it, can take milliseconds. Can you imagine if a smart company can do that?
There are tens of thousands of radio stations in US alone, thousands of tv channels. Not to count the worldwide opportunities. I will not be surprised if, by indexing the text of audio and video files, the indexed information will be several times larger than the actual Google’s database.
Measuring branding will also be a little more fun: you go to the search engine, search for your brand name, and you’ll find the station/channel, the hour and the day when the name was mentioned.
A client of ours recently encountered a great spike in his conversions (4x than normal). As any good marketers, we’ve immediately segmented the data and found that it was due to direct traffic. But why did that spike happen? We dug more and we couldn’t find anything using the web analytics tools. We then spoke with the CSRs and surprise, some clients were mentioning they heard the name on a well know tv show.
Now, how simple would it be if you would’ve just typed your brand name on a search engine (or analytics tool) and you’ll find to which media the conversions should be attributed? The nonline model will become a little easier to analyze, isn’t it?
I don’t have money to invest in this, but I am waiting for angel investors, and BTW, hurry up, Google is already experimenting with this:
http://labs.google.com/gaudi
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based company, providing web analytics services to companies of all sizes, from start-ups to corporations. Please contact us if you need assistance with any of the online marketing services we provide.
