Dabble to Sell Video Viewership Data to Publishers
Dabble has built a video search platform around the preferences of viewers. Founder and CEO Mary Hodder calls it "people powered search." — The company will soon provide metadata about search to publishers who need to understand why and where their clips are being watch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Dabble entered video in early 2006 as a 'people powered search' engine built around viewer preferences — the launch writeup on Om Malik's broadband blog framed it as search shaped by what people actually watch. The new move converts that accumulated signal into a product: founder and CEO Mary Hodder will license metadata about search and viewing behavior to publishers who want to know why and where their clips get watched.
The announcement lands squarely inside a 2007 wave of companies trying to make sense of video programmatically: in June alone, Digitalsmiths raised $6M to match advertising to video content and blinkx moved to match ads against video files. Where those two aim metadata at ad targeting, Dabble's angle is to sell the understanding directly to the content owner.
First-order effects
- Publishers signing on get a diagnostic layer over their own catalogs — why clips are found and where they are watched — replacing raw view counts with viewer-preference data when deciding what to produce and how to place it.
- Dabble's revenue base shifts from consumer search traffic to licensing metadata, a test of whether its catalog of viewer preferences holds standalone value independent of being a destination site.
Second-order effects
- The ad-matching players working the same signals — blinkx and Digitalsmiths among them — now have an incentive to bundle analytics with monetization, since a publisher paying for viewing metadata is one contract away from paying for ad targeting on the same data.
- Publishers armed with behavioral metadata gain negotiating leverage over syndication and hosting partners, because they can quantify which placements actually drive watch behavior rather than accepting aggregate numbers from the platform.
Third-order effects
- If metadata licensing proves out, online video separates into distinct layers — content, distribution, and an intelligence layer priced on top — with whoever owns viewing-behavior data earning margin regardless of where the clip itself is hosted.
- Search engines and analytics vendors start converging: the same viewer-preference data that powers 'people powered search' ranking is the product being resold, blurring whether a video search company's business is finding clips or explaining them.
The trend: Online video is stratifying into a measurable data layer, with viewer-behavior metadata emerging as a salable product alongside search and ad matching.