Speculation is rising around a potential acquisition of Blinkx, a video search engine by either Google or News Corp (and possibly Yahoo!). Traffic to Blinkx has increased steadily over the past year – the market share of visits for the week ending May 10, 2008 is 10x higher than the same week in 2007. Much of this growth is being driven by new users, since 62% of the traffic to Blinkx during the same timeframe had not visited the website in the past 30 days.

Among a custom category of 68 online video websites, Blinkx currently ranks #10, but their strength is really to serve as a referring partner for many of the sites. Of the websites that received traffic from Blinkx, Photobucket was the main beneficiary with 20% of the downstream traffic followed by The Weather Channel and Google. Websites for News Corp. (Photobucket and MySpace), Google (Google, YouTube and Blogger), and Yahoo! (mail, search, and video) are all well represented in the top 10 downstream for the week ending May 10, 2008, highlighting why they make logical potential bidders.

Heather Dougherty

Heather Dougherty is Director, Research at Hitwise. This piece originally appeared on Hitwise's analyst blog here.

Image By Hochhaus-Stadtteile