Digital video is the preferred form of media for many audience demographics. Those audiences, highly engaged with video, provide fertile ground for advertising revenue, sponsored video content, and even paywall revenue growth.
However, despite the undisputed appeal for audiences, it presents media businesses with a conundrum: produce video content cheaply to maximize ROI, or invest in quality video leveraging the brand, with the risk of a lower return. So how do media businesses choose which topics or subjects are right to build a video strategy around. And when do revenue opportunities like sponsors enter into those discussions?
Commercial viability
For most outlets, video has to pay its way. Documentary-style video is expensive to produce. Therefore, it is often simply not worth the investment for primarily text-based commodity news publishers.
To offset that issue (i.e., the high cost of video production and the risk of spending money on content that doesn’t pay off), The Independent created Independent TV with a clear rule: No video series gets made unless it already has a sponsor or advertiser committed to funding it.
This commissioning bottleneck of sorts serves as a test of whether the subject was of worth to a potential sponsor in video form. The approach does present potential frustration lin that that advertising priorities dictate what gets made, meaning creative or editorially strong concepts could stall if they didn’t appeal to sponsors. However, this approach prevented the paper from spending a significant amount of money on a video project that might never have been commercially viable.
A similar approach is taken by The Sun, which has seen its video share of digital revenue increased to 18% in the latest reported results. Jon Lloyd, Director of Video for the newspaper says that, “Making video in isolation doesn’t make sense at The Sun; when commissioning Sun Originals the commercial considerations are right at the beginning. That was the genesis for Sun Originals: high quality shows which advertisers like to sponsor.
“It must always be editorially driven and work for our audiences. But editorial teams will work with the commercial teams in order to launch the show and build the commercial aspect in, tailoring it to the client. It can’t just be their name on the show anymore.”
As a result of that strategy The Sun is working with clients who “have never used us in a digital capacity before, like M&S and Card Factory”. Recognizing the synergy between its consumer-focused news approach and the commercial opportunity, it has been focused on two specific content verticals for Originals commissioning: sports and Fabulous, which encompasses women’s fashion, beauty and lifestyle.
At the same time, commercial considerations do not factor into discussions around video creation for news organizations whose commercial proposition is more supporter-based.
The Guardian confirms that they do not create videos with sponsors in mind. Those discussions are not part of the overall decision about when and where to launch a video series.
Nevertheless, the company is not ignoring the audience growth opportunities of digital video and is set to invest further in using it for storytelling. As its editor-in-chief recently told Press Gazette, “I mean, at the moment, [when] we get a big story, it usually will have a podcast attached for example. It will usually have a video explainer attached. It will usually have all sorts of stuff attached already, but I think it’s the next stage of that.”
Cost vs return
Some major titles are increasingly looking to video as an audience growth opportunity first. The idea is that audiences attracted by video are likely to convert, even if that form of content does not exactly match the majority of the paper’s content.
Juliet Riddell is head of new formats at the Financial Times, which has been experimenting with news-led short films. Its latest, ‘Recall Me Maybe’, is a short fictional film that examines dementia, AI, and the unreliability of memory and artificial intelligence. That’s quite the departure for the title. However, its position in front of the paywall speaks to its belief that video of this sort is worth investing in as an audience acquisition tool.
Speaking to Media Voices, Riddell explained: “All the films are trying to connect an audience with something that’s happening now and that we feel we need to communicate now.”
We also see a number of publications investing in digital video to diversify the audiences that are exposed to the brand, albeit with a far lower cost base. That is particularly true for those media businesses looking to convert more audiences by creating more touchpoints.
Chris Stone is executive producer of podcasts and video at the New Statesman. He explains: “We’re already producing podcasts, so adding video to that production workflow doubles up on the content that we’re making, so we’re getting more out of a single record. That video then extends our audience reach on YouTube, [and] also on social platforms. And the purpose of that is to grow the top of our funnel.”
He also notes that the ROI of a piece of content – in any form – is based on how widely it can be repurposed: “If I was starting something from scratch, I wouldn’t start with original video. I would start with multimedia content that can be repurposed on lots of different platforms.”
Beyond digital video
Given the scale of investment in video podcasts over the past few years – with a recently announced collaboration between Spotify and Netflix acting as the cherry on top – it is unsurprising that newsbrands recognize the value of delivering its star audio content in another broadly-accessible format. Vox, for instance, has just poached the NYT’s Astead Herndon, appointing him as a host and editorial director with a remit to launch and lead a new multiplatform video podcast.
This approach bears fruit for publishers that have been investing in multimedia content for years: the podcasts have already proven to be commercially successful in audio, and the additional costs of filming and editing them are relatively small. In commissioning these relatively small, these media businesses take advantage of advertisers’ hunger for video content, and video’s ability to open up new audiences.
Whether it is a high-quality audience play like that of the Financial Times, or the more commercial-led commissioning approach, video is increasingly seen as a must-have for news and magazine brands. Finding the sweet spot between commercial growth and audience development is paramount, but dependent on the wider commercial strategy of the title.
