More on SEO & Footage/Images Houses

Peter Sargent | May 24, 2007, 10:15 AM

My recent blog discussed the implications for SEO on stock images/footage sites. And my colleague, Joe Laszlo, recently blogged about a meeting he had with Gotuit.com. My analogy might be something more along the lines of searching for footage of “guitarist + crowd” if I’m creating footage from a rock concert for a new cologne ad. (Admittedly, Joe’s analogy is more fun…but, work with me.) Gotuit is positioning itself to enable the proper tagging of video, which could easily benefit stock footage buyers.

In addition, I met recently with the VP of Marketing (Howard Seibel) at Veotag. Veotag’s current focus is in tagging corporate video for indexing. For the most part, it enables companies (think HR departments that have compiled a training video) to index the video, insert relevant bookmarks, overlay text, etc. SEO could be another application for Veotag as well. And then there are others….Motionbox, Click.tv, Viddler, Mojiti. I’ll be asking Joe his opinion on these guys.

But bottom line, SEO is a tremendous issue for both image and footage houses. As the number of sites carrying stock footage/images continues to rise, the buyer will increasingly look to the Web search engines to locate the perfect clip or pic. Customer loyalty for both new and repeat purchases of images/photos is increasingly in doubt. That’s a concern for the large stock houses who have benefited from being seen as the default resource(s) for buyers, but good news for vendors offering tagging solutions for multimedia.