I’ve been continually disappointed with video search engines not finding what I want. They all seem to be highly inaccurate and poorly designed. My favorite so far has been PureVideo, but it’s been by no means perfect.
But I recently stumbled across uLinkx, a video search engine which is apparently being self funded by a small team of 3 people and receiving approximately 10,000 visitors a day.
For such a young start-up this site is doing amazingly well. The results are relevant and plentiful and the design is very clean and full of features.
It feels very similar to YouTube except it has a better design and you are actually browsing a variety of video sharing websites at once including MetaCafe, MySpace, Revver, Grouper and YouTube. Here’s a screenshot:
Just like a normal video sharing site
Rather than taking you to the individual website, the individual video results are embedded within the ULinkx site keeping everything very consistent and user friendly. The site even has the embed code, link information, the ability to comment and the ability to bookmark your own videos, just like you could do on a normal video sharing site.
Innovative Money Making Feature
Additionally it allows you to create playlists for yourself which other people can see, making it a bit like a simple Magnify by allowing you to create your own channel of videos. You can then make money by providing your Google Adsense information to ULinkx and your ads will be shown on your playlist pages.
This opens up plenty of money making opportunities where people could create a specialized channel on a particular subject (e.g fishing) and showcase the best videos from around the web, updating it on a regular basis.
If you have your own selection of videos that you have uploaded to Metacafe you could list them in a playlist on uLinkx. Not only can you possibly earn from Metacafe but you can earn of the uLinkx playlist too!
A brilliant business model
uLinkx has the best of both worlds. It feels like a video sharing website but yet doesn’t have to host any videos. It will always have more videos than the individual video sharing site will but without the added bandwidth cost.
Could uLinkx be the future Google for video?
Keep a look out for an interview with one of the founders of uLinkx coming soon.
[uLinkx]
Click here to read the interview with the co-founder of uLinkx
