• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, November 11, 2011

Despite global economic concerns, blinkx says advertiser demand is as strong as ever.

As a result, the video search company posted strong revenue growth for its fiscal first half, while pretax profits fell on costs related to a recent acquisition.

Continuing to grow its audience and blue-chip brand partners, blinkx reported a revenue increase of 63% to $44.6 million during the last six months ending Sept. 30.

“Momentum was driven by increased traffic through the blinkx engine and the continued success of our advertising platform, AdHoc, in attracting new marquee brands, such as Disney and Kellogg's,” said Suranga Chandratillake, blinkx founder and CEO.

Earlier this year, blinkx acquired Burst Media for $30 million. Also, blinkx just announced the acquisition of PVMG, an ad network and digital marketing agency, for $36 million.

Per the deal, blinkx expects to integrate PVMG's advertising platform with blinkx's to enable the blinkx video search engine to respond to a portion of PVMG's 1.5 billion daily queries with relevant video results.  

With the Burst deal, blinkx hopes to bring its 35 million hours of online video and TV to Burst's network of over 157 million unique users.

Blinkx is determined to create contextually relevant video channels for Burst's network of publishers -- thereby aggregating an online video audience for advertisers, which it believes could rival the scale of television networks.

In mid-September, Burst debuted four community-focused channels to connect advertisers with gamers, moms, sports fans and fashionistas.

The channels -- Giant Realm, MomIQ, Stadium, and Ella -- were all built around common interests and passions, and together comprise thousands of independent publishers.

In conjunction with the launch of the new channels, Burst also unveiled new video and social advertising tools, including sponsored conversations and video widgets. 

Blinkx is known for indexing audio and video content, and making it searchable and available on demand.

Video ads remain the fastest-growing online ad format, and in recent research, eMarketer has forecast that the market will be worth $5.7 billion by 2014 -- up from $1.4 million in 2010.

“Video advertising continues to thrive, with double-digit growth forecast for the next five years, and our performance over the last six months underlines the strength of blinkx's model within this dynamic marketplace,” Chandratillake added.

This past year, brands such as Honda, Microsoft and Revlon booked campaigns with blinkx through various agencies, including Starcom Mediavest, Ogilvy and McCann Erickson.