Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Ryan Born, CEO and founder of AudioMicro, which is creating an online marketplace for stock audio clips (for use in online videos, etc.) passes on that he’s giving readers of socalTECH free music downloads if they join the site. He said that readers of socalTECH who want two free download credits (worth $8.99) can join using the code SOCALTECH2.

Born is hoping that his company can gain a good position in the emerging stock audio market, a market which is paralleling the stock photography market in allowing people to more easily download and use audio tracks, sound effects, etc. through royalty-free licenses. His firm is going up against one of the big guys in the market — Getty Images — which just launched its own stock audio service, iStockAudio, earlier this year. His firm is backed by DFJ Frontier.

There’s been more than enough written on the public launch of the NBC/News Corp. venture Hulu today, and perhaps I’m in the minority; but looking over the titles streaming out of Hulu, I’m suddenly realizing that network television lost me long ago. Out of the dozens of TV shows available — either as episodes, or even only with clips — on the site, I realize I’ve maybe (maybe) watched a couple of shows, and even then probably in passing at the airport waiting for a flight. Albeit, I’m probably a fraction of the population, since I very rarely watch TV, but the networks have a big job in front of them to attract back folks who they’ve lost long ago to cable/satellite, the Internet, and elsewhere.

For anyone who has been making the rounds of the holiday parties and networking events, one of the things you hear quite a bit now is people bragging about their traffic numbers. Just today, Funny or Die — the video site from comedy star Will Ferrell — reported that it had “surpassed 50 million views” of the firm’s hallmark “The Landlord” video. The video is hilarious — however you have to wonder how (and if) those traffic numbers correlate in any way to revenue. I recall a podcast I did last year with Tony Greenberg of Ramprate, talking about the costs of hosting video on the Internet. Traffic isn’t exactly free, and I wonder what the actual costs versus revenue numbers are for all that video traffic.