When you search for audio or video content using the popular RealOne media player from RealNetworks, or through Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, the results are provided by a search service called Singingfish.
Singingfish is a Seattle-based firm that presents itself as the world’s leading audio and video search engine.
The Singingfish database already includes “tens of millions” of content items in streaming, live and on-demand audio and video media formats. Now the company plans to expand and enhance it index by offering content owners (and advertisers) a paid inclusion program.
Paid inclusion is a somewhat controversial practice in the Web search field. It allows advertisers to pay a fee to ensure that their content is listed in search engine results, rather than trusting to the technology of the search engine to find their material through the normal process of traversing and polling the Web by following links.
In spite of controversy, which has led to consumer protests and even a U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigation in the past, paid inclusion has become an accepted way of doing business for nearly every significant search site, including leading portals such as Yahoo, Lycos and MSN.
There are various models of inclusion, ranging from straight-forward advertising on a “pay-per-click” basis (Google, Overture and others), where the paid results are generally segregated from regular search results and given extra prominence (listed first, or in a separate highlighted area); to a simpler fee-for-service, where the content owners’ payment merely ensures that the content is present in the search engine database, but placement in the results depends on the normal relevance-ranking process of the search site (Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista, Teoma).
The controversy over the practice has to do with the relevance and credibility of search results. If advertisers are paying to get their content listed at the top of the page, is the search engine still doing its job of finding the best results for each search?
The benefits of paid inclusion for both publisher and end user are clearest in the case of content that is difficult to index through typical search engine technology. For example, a large online store such as Amazon or Musicians’ Friend, or a news provider such as New York Times or CNET News, may have many thousands or even millions of pages of content that would never be found by a search engine – because the pages are generated ‘on the fly’ in response to specific visitor requests and browsing at the site.
Audio and video media content falls into this category of difficult-to-index material, so there is a compelling case for Singingfish to offer paid inclusion.
Just like an Amazon or New York Times, a streaming media service may have many thousands of items available on demand, but a search engine will never locate and index them. This is even more the case with audio and video, as opposed to text-based content, because it is difficult or impossible for a search engine to obtain key information such as title, artist or author from an audio or video file or stream.
Singingfish says its research shows that over 20 percent of all Web search queries are best satisfied with audio and/or video results. With paid inclusion, the company says it will be able to direct end-users’ search queries instantly to their specific content in a relevant and meaningful way. Singingfish already indexes tens of millions of streaming media files in categories that include music, sports, news, TV, radio and business.
“We’ve discovered that rare three-way win where the consumer, advertiser and portal all benefit,” comments Karen Howe, CEO of Singingfish. “The advertiser has a powerful new medium for driving key messages, the consumer wins by getting access to the streaming content they were looking for plus relevant information from the advertiser; and finally the portal benefits from offering a useful service to consumers who don’t have to leave their portal to find audio and video content.”
Paid inclusion allows an advertiser to pay for streaming media files they select to be indexed by the Singingfish search engine. While this does not guarantee placement, it does allow their content to appear in the search engine’s results for relevant queries.
Singingfish Paid Inclusion also gives the advertiser added promotional value by providing two links – the stream itself, as usual, and also an associated “landing page.” This gives the content owner total control over the landing page, which can (for example) expose the visitor to a related product or service. If a customer decides to go further than the initial audio/video stream they clicked on – the result can mean significant and immediate return on investment to the advertiser.
The Singingfish Paid Inclusion program is sold and managed through Marketleap, a firm that has deep experience with similar programs, including the Inktomi paid inclusion program (recently taken over by Yahoo) that is used by numerous major search portals such as Hotbot and MSN Search.
Listings submitted through the paid inclusion program can include data on bitrate, format (MP3, Real, WMA, Quicktime), language, category (from among many hundreds), duration, release date, performer, and medium (audio, video), in addition to the obvious search info such as title, author, description and keywords.
If you want your content listed by Singingfish, but you don’t want to pay for the service, Singingfish also offers a free submission process.
