It's being announced today that MySpace founder Brad Greenspan has acquired the majority stake in Flurl.com, a Belgium-based video sharing site and search engine. The acquisition was made by Greenspan's Los Angeles investment firm, LiveUniverse, which focuses on video, entertainment and social networking. This isn't the least bit surprising: I've spoken to website owners who say they were approached by Greenspan regarding similar deals, although I can't disclose those.
Flurl claims to be a leading independent video search engine, with more than 5.6 million unique users in September 2006 according to ComScore. They're also promoting the fact that they rank 125 on Alexa, although that data is notoriously unreliable. Pageviews are at more than 100 million per month, while ComScore says that uniques have grown 75% since November 2005. I pulled up the data from Mashable Labs to get a ballpark figure on Flurl's usage on MySpace: however, I'm seeing less than 1000 mentions of "flurl" within the html of MySpace pages, suggesting that MySpace isn't the biggest source of traffic here.
Flurl indexes media sites, they say, through "manual HTML pattern matching" - that's unlike some rival sites, which rely solely on RSS feeds. The site searches across all the major players: Metacafe, YouTube, Grouper, Revver, Blip.tv and more, with clips being played on an embedded player on the site itself. Flurl also indexes images, audio and flash. The interface, you'll notice, is very similar to Digg, allowing users to "Flurl" or "Hurl" clips to change their ranking on the page.