Interview with Pixsy's CEO Chase Norlin: a Search Distribution Model Going Portal
In writing my interview questions for Chase Norlin, Pixsy's CEO, I decided to hit him with John Battelle's Failure to Fail post in which he says: "VCs, even the ones that funded video startup #200 and 201, won't keep funding non-performing companies over and over again..."

Battelle's didn't write that post to pick on video startups, but I thought it would be a good place to begin a conversation with Mr. Norlin.

Norlin was quick to point out that Pixsy is NOT a video sharing service like YouTube and the new horde of video startups - it's a video and image search engine + thumbnail index that sees YouTube and others as content providing partners rather than competitors.

"Why rebuild YouTube when we can aggregate and distribute all of them?"

Pixsy's Distribution Model
Further - and this was the key point Norlin educated me on - Pixsy's built around a distribution model. They do the heavy lifting of index creation and assigning appropriate pre-roll ads and enable partners to provide video and image search to visitors.

Pixsy's broadening its distribution focus shortly with the creation of PixsyPower, which will enable micropublishers of personal blogs and social network profile pages to monetize video and image search for themselves.

The distribution model is natural for Norlin, with his background at ad distribution network ValueClick, where he learned that a network is only as powerful as the checks it can write to its distributors. He also decided there that he didn't want to compete with traditional online ad networks or pay per click engines.

"Our business is focused on building out a media search platform that puts other people in the video search business..."

For those considering a distribution model - Norlin offers that you had better have %99.99 up time. If your network goes down then you're costing other people money, not just yourself.

Besides the launch of longtail targeted PixsyPower, Norlin discussed the largely unintentional development of Pixsy as a video and image portal.

Pixsy's Portal Model
The unexpected popularity contributed to Pixsy's "Time's 50 coolest companies of 2006" award and spawned the creation of StarHabit, a celebrity monitoring portal.

This success may prove to be double edged when/if it creates conflicts with potential partners. Especially considering Pixsy has planned 30 more vertical launches over the next several months. News is their next target vertical.

Also notable is how Pixsy's experimenting with enabling users to save video and image searches, share them, and receive notification when new items of interest appear in StarHabit.

This makes for a more involved search experience, and one that's more appropriate to the way people consume media online. I hope to see Pixsy wrap this piece into PixsyPower in the future.

Pixsy and Growth
Norlin's approach to growth is refreshing - "spend as little money as you can and generate revenue as soon as humanly possible."

Though Pixsy is not yet profitable, it's important to note that they worked for a year out of pocket, when all the Pixsy team had day jobs.

There are currently 9 Pixsy employees, with a major contingent of ex-Microsoft employees. Some of the full-timers started as consultants.

When I asked about Pixsy's recent "less than 2 million" in funding, Norlin said they needed the cash "to not feel nervous." Further, "we need to grow and capture the market as quickly as possible because we don't have long sales cycles on the internet."

PR has been an important avenue for growth as well - and Norlin has done much of that work himself. He ascribes the Time Magazine story to his "ridiculous amount of persistence" and the fact that "I bugged them for a year and a half."

Video and image search are the fastest growing areas for search right now - Norlin said Google gets 9% of its traffic from image search. "We're in a market that's rapidly growing," Norlin told me. "All the boats are rising."

Watch for new Pixsy crawling technologies announced at a tech conference in Monaco later this month.

Also See:
Chase Norlin's blog
Pixsy to Offer PixsyPower: Video Search Monetization for Blogs and MySpace
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |