CNET’s Web 2.0 Blog Author Caroline McCarthy reports on Dabble…
A small start-up is trying to take over that niche. Lifehacker, the Gawker Media-owned tips-and-tricks blog, recently steered its readers to Dabble, a beta search engine that claims to be able to paw through data from nearly 250 video hosting sites, as well as a whole slew of independent sites, in order to find anything from Jessica Simpson’s latest talk show appearance to (heaven forbid) all those “Numa Numa” remix videos.
My brief experiment with Dabble was a delight. I tried some random searches, and it did quite well. In fact, it was able to find my own videos based on titles and tags. If it found a YouTube version, it spawned YouTube. It even found a video that I uploaded to Revver in the past hour. So presumably it’s “real time,” which is remarkable given the speed.
The tricky thing for Dabble will be holding on to the audience. Instead of spawning new browsers it ought to embed the video into its site so it can sell ads. Otherwise it’s a nice search engine but not a destination.
The real question is- is there a market for a video search engine? Even if it’s a hyper engine with social networking… will we go there instead of YouTube and others? Or will one of the larger site build or buy there way into Dabble’s niche?
Yeah, know Dabble. Mary Hodder, the founder ‘gets it’ – the social web I mean. Hence no ads, Kevin. 🙂
No ads? No fee to customers? What am I missing here? How do you fund these puppies?
Speaking of… eBaumsWorld has a $25 premium service. I would definitely suggest the companies develop user-base programs. I’ll bet some people would be willing to pay, for example, for the advanced functionality of the DIRECTOR status on YouTube (you get a page, some feeds, the ability to sort, a logo, a URL).
Oh- that’s it! Charge a flat fee and that gets you advanced service and a participation in the ad revenue!