View a transcript of this interview
Most forward-thinking bloggers and Web publishers know that they need to use more video. Whether it’s a college, business, political campaign or media property, video must be part of the offering. With the advent of broadband and faster video programs, consumers want video and there is growing opportunity for advertising revenue from online video ads.
It is inevitable that most major Web sites and many blogs will become video-rich this year, but where will publishers get the video? What is the video syndication model? A lot of this will become clearer this year as big players, including NBC Universal, step into the field.
New York-based Magnify.net has has developed a platform to integrate consumer generated video onto Web sites and blogs. The company provides publishers with the ability to integrate entire video pages into their sites or just sections of existing pages. They pull a number of clips from sources that include YouTube, Revver and Google Video.
The relevant videos are served to these pages by various means: by custom tailored search terms, the selections of the site’s viewers or the picks of the site administrator. Contextual ads are placed around the video. Flash players and their skins remains the same, but are resized to fit the page. Magnify.net adds a tool bar to the bottom of the player. There are no ads in the video stream.
Magnify.net hosts the pages and sells ads around these videos and shares the revenue with the site on a split basis.
Steve Rosenbaum is the founder of Magnify.net, and a pioneer in organizing community generated content for publishers; his work for MTV includes creating MTVUnfiltered. It was great to catch up with him for a chat and a demo of Magnify. He demos some cools sites that use Magnify to index content, such as Sailnet and the New York Hamster House.
Aggregating consumer-generated video is an important, emerging business model. Here at Beet.TV, we have seen some really impressive developments with Dabble and StumbleUpon. And of course YouTube and Brightcove and others have created themed channels on their own portals.
The whole world of syndication is really changing. But one thing is clear: there is a huge demand for relevant video on web sites.
