Magnify Moves Customers to Pay Model, Aims for Cash Flow Positive

Magnify is growing dollars by migrating customers to a fee-based service, the company's CEO Steve Rosenbaum told Beet.TV in an interview earlier this month.

Magnify.net is a video platform that has built its business around search, discovery, and curation of online programming, which has helped the company command a network of 61,000 sites uploading 2.1 million videos each week. Notable customers include New York Magazine, Rodale Press, Weather Channel, and Reader's Digest.

Those customers pay a flat fee to use the service, Rosenbaum explained. "We had this shocking revelation that people should pay us, so we asked them to pay us and they agreed," he said, adding that those media partners all use the Magnify Enterprise product.

Customers pay a flat fee to use the service based on a fixed set of traffic and a CPM based on new pages Magnify grows for them. "Our philosophy is you should be making money today," Rosenbaum said. For New York Magazine's video page, for instance, Magnify provides the look and feel, the navigation, and the video player, which allows for more ad opportunities across the entire page instead of just in the player, he said.

Magnify also offers a pro version and a free version of its service.

He told TechCrunch earlier this summer that he expects to be cash flow positive by year end. Magnify raised an additional $500,000 in funding last month.

Magnify also inked a deal for the videos it powers to be available to Boxee users.

Andy interviewed Rosenbaum last week outside the NY Video Meetup.

Daisy Whitney, Senior Producer