http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/16519

Written by: Noah.Gellman

Today we find ourselves in a YouTube-propelled world of video that is enabled by ever-more prolific broadband capability and access. The user – or for the purposes of this article, consumer – is quickly coming to expect a video offering on the sites he or she visits. At present, three concepts are converging which suggest that we are only at the tip of the iceberg when conceptualizing the opportunity provided by video on the net. The factors are:

1) As mentioned, video on the net is no longer the exception, but becoming the norm. 2) Television is already losing mindshare to the web and advertising dollars are following. 3) Neilsen’s recent announcement that the company will be measuring not just page views but time spent on site is a concept that melds with a captive video experience.

Professionally created content is finding its way onto our PCs but the reality is that there are over 200 video-sharing sites, each hosting untold hours of user-generated and uploaded content. Manify.net is a first-move content management solution that has set out to capitalize on the three points listed above by drawing from the existing video on the web and bringing a targeted video offering to existing sites.

Magnify allows a site administrator (or user if enabled) to aggregate video from a host of sites (Metacafe, Google Video, YouTube, etc.) into a single platform. The highly customizable template-driven platform can be manipulated to have the look and feel of an existing site and provide a seamless integration. In other words, while Magnify becomes your ‘content management solution’ the technology is more-or-less baked into an existing offering. Furthermore, the company’s widget gives the administrator flexibility in terms of integration. Through a quick and easy set up, Magnify does the work and rolls the content into a user-friendly UI (user interface) experience.

Magnify is monetizing its offering by serving ads against the video. The endgame is to build a variation of an ad-network so that Magnify can broker the advertising across all of its network pages. Furthermore, Magnify is built upon a rev-share model.

The market opportunity for video is tremendous. Magnify is in ahead of the curve and working to capitalize on its early entry into the infant video market. Since launching at Demo this past January, Magnify is currently serving 7 million page views per month and over 10,000 channels have been launched. Especially encouraging is that of the 10,000 channels, 70% are public channels and most interestingly, time on Magnify channels has tripled from 2.5 minutes in February to 7 minutes in July.

Nevertheless, there will still be challenges. The video space is becoming increasingly crowded and to hover above the noise, Magnify will have to capitalize on its early movement and continue to accumulate real estate. The hockey stick growth is encouraging and so too is the market potential. Looking towards the fall Magnify.net will be a hot contender for the AlwaysOn Media 100 List.