Month: February 2018

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When Kimpton Hotels became part of the Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) in 2014, it saw potential synergies around data and technology it could share with its parent company and sister hotel groups. IHG has more than 5,000 hotels around the world from brands such as Candlewood Suites, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and InterContinental. By tapping… Continue reading »

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AdWords, search, display, the Play Store, YouTube, AdMob, the Google Display Network… App advertisers used to have to run six or more campaigns at once with Google to try and achieve a single objective. But, as of November, there’s been only one way to promote apps across all Google properties: Universal App Campaigns. Google first… Continue reading »

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“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.  Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an independent audience strategy consultant.  With each passing quarter, the share of marketer budgets allocated to data grows, and with that growth comes greater scrutiny – rightly so. And yet this… Continue reading »

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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Judy Shapiro, founder and CEO at engageSimply. I don’t believe it’s an overstatement to suggest we are witnessing the first real rightsizing of digital media impressions since ad tech became… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Telecom At Me, Bro Comcast is planning a $31 billion bid to purchase all of UK broadcaster Sky – though Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told the The Wall Street Journal it would also accept a majority stake. Fox’s 39% stake in Sky was a… Continue reading »

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The cyclical nature of media means that Twitter is enjoying some time in the sun with publishers. According to multiple publishers, Twitter has delivered more video views than usual over the last two months, for some making up for the reach lost on Facebook since it made changes to the news feed.

Across its top brands, magazine publisher Bauer found that Twitter video views increased fivefold from October to December 2017. CNBC International said it has had “notable growth” in its video views in February, but the company declined to share specific numbers. During the same month, lifestyle publisher Stylist saw a 500 percent increase in its Twitter video views as a result of dedicating more resources to Twitter. Men’s interest site Joe Media saw a 20 percent increase in video views over the last four months to 6.2 million. A source familiar with the matter said that over the last year, Twitter has had a “significant” increase in the number of video views on the platform compared to the previous year.

Last year, Twitter announced feature updates to improve content relevance, including mobile push notifications and “while you were away” tweets to surface highly engaging content, driving up discoverability for publisher videos. Twitter has also introduced view counts for video. Buoyed by higher views, the number of publishers and the amount they post to the platform have naturally increased.

Bauer started to focus more on Twitter halfway through last year across a number of its entertainment and lifestyle titles, including fashion title Grazia, urban radio station Kiss FM and film brand Empire. Since then, Bauer has tweaked metadata and video length in order to figure out what works, which is typically video clips between 40 and 60 seconds in length. For Empire, three-minute video clips perform just as well, according to the publisher.

“We’ve seen a big resurgence in Twitter,” said Niall McGarry, founder of Joe Media, adding that the growth in views “is significant.” In the last six months, Joe Media has doubled the size of its editorial and production team and increased the amount of content it posts to Twitter, particularly before, during and after football matches. In December, Neville Southall, former Everton goalkeeper, delivered a Christmas message urging people to be more compassionate, which the publisher posted to Twitter. The combination of a football personality and a political message worked well, with the video amassing 7,000 retweets, 12,000 likes and nearly a million views, while the same content on Facebook got comparably little traction, with 1,000 shares.

“Whether content does well on Facebook is in the lap of the gods. The algorithm is much more complex,” said McGarry. “Twitter has a consistency that Facebook doesn’t.”

Twitter’s payouts to publishers as part of its Amplify program have grown 60 percent since last year, according to the platform, although Twitter wouldn’t share how many publishers are part of the program. Amplify launched five years ago as a way to help publishers make money from selling pre-roll ads around their Twitter content. Bauer tends not to monetize its events-coverage videos on Twitter to avoid hampering their reach. However, having a variety of ways for publishers to monetize their content on Twitter, like sponsorships and Periscope Super Hearts, is a bonus.

“One of the advantages [with Amplify] is that publishers are often getting an extra paycheck with minimal extra effort,” said Garrett Goodman, vp of business development at social video platform Wochit. “They’re just posting the same videos they’re already making for Facebook, but this time actually monetizing the views, so there’s virtually no downside here.”

But Twitter won’t ever match Facebook as a referral source. Parsely data shows Twitter makes up less than 3 percent of publisher referral traffic.

Twitter also has its own issues. The platform can be a toxic environment for hate speech and trolling. But moves like removing verification from accounts with ties to far-right political groups show it is trying to address these problems.

The fact that publishers are exploring wider distribution on platforms beyond Facebook is hardly surprising, given Facebook’s news-feed changes and the way U.K. publishers found out about them. Other platforms like LinkedIn and Snapchat are seizing the opportunity. Publishers say Twitter’s U.K. team, particularly Lee LeBorgne, Amplify partnerships lead, and Julia White, head of entertainment and lifestyle content partnerships, are making advances to work more collaboratively, too.

For example, within 24 hours of Grazia posting an explainer video on Twitter with facts about Meghan Markle, shortly after the announcement that she was engaged to Prince Harry, the Twitter team flagged Bauer that the video was performing better than expected. This spurred the publisher to create additional content for the platform.

“We have an open dialogue on almost a daily basis,” said Greg Adams, head of video at Bauer Xcel Media. “That makes it easy to quickly adapt strategy and key learnings.”

For more on all things video, subscribe to Digiday’s new weekly video briefing, written by Sahil Patel.

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Turner’s Super Deluxe would have as good a reason as any other publisher to stop airing live videos on Facebook as the social network stops subsidizing broadcasts and cuts publishers’ organic reach. Throughout 2017, Super Deluxe’s live videos on Facebook averaged half a million views, but this year, that number has hovered around 250,000 views.

“The minute that Facebook made this announcement [in January that it would deprioritize publishers’ organic content], our views split in half,” said Cyrus Ghahremani, head of live programming at Super Deluxe.

Despite that decline, Super Deluxe plans to do more with Facebook Live. By the end of 2018, it plans to produce one brand-sponsored live video every week, Ghahremani said. That’s because while Super Deluxe’s live viewership has fallen, its engagement rates have risen, and Facebook, along with brands, is prioritizing engagement.

“Generally speaking, engagements mean a lot more than views, especially with different standards of what counts as a view,” said Gabe Gordon, managing partner at Reach Agency. “Someone interacting or engaging with a piece of content is always going to mean more. If you’re driving people to purchase or click on something, any form of engagement is always going to be valued over reaching someone passively.”

Still, many publishers prize views and the ad revenue they can reap from those views. So it’s no surprise that some publishers have cooled on the format after Facebook stopped paying them subsidies for live video.

The share of top U.S. publishers using Facebook Live in a given month has waned since peaking in November 2016, though the majority of them still use the format, according to data from Socialbakers. The social marketing firm examined the 1,000 most-followed U.S. publisher accounts on Facebook and tracked how many had aired at least one live video on Facebook for each month from January 2016 through January 2018.

Based on that data, Facebook Live’s popularity among publishers has receded, but not to the point of a full-blown retreat. In January 2018, 52 percent of the examined U.S. publishers aired a Facebook Live broadcast, down from a high of 63 percent in November 2016. Similarly, the total number of monthly live videos these publishers posted is down from its peak of more than 21,000 in September 2017, but is still trending up.

The downward usage trend may coincide with Facebook’s decision to no longer pay some publishers to produce live videos. But it may also be that publishers are struggling to produce live video that keeps viewers’ attention and attracts attention-seeking brands in the process.

“When [the money from Facebook] got cut off and also when publishers realized they needed whole staffs to go live, I feel like they were like, ‘If we’re not good at this and it’s not really helping on the revenue side or scaling our audience that much, we don’t need to do it as much,’” said Shira Lazar, co-founder of digital video studio What’s Trending.

Like Super Deluxe, Lazar is sticking with Facebook Live. She hosts a daily show on Facebook called “Circa Pop Live” that her company produces and is backed by Sinclair Broadcast Group. The TV broadcaster’s backing has helped Lazar to navigate Facebook’s seemingly ever-shifting emphasis on live video. In addition to getting paid by Sinclair to produce the show and syndicate clips across the media company’s properties, she works with Sinclair to find brands to sponsor the show, which averages 50,000 viewers per airing.

Live video on Facebook could see a renaissance following the company’s recent news-feed algorithm change. At the same time as Facebook said it would de-emphasize publishers’ and brands’ organic posts in people’s feeds, it held out hope for companies producing live videos.

“Page posts that generate conversation between people will show higher in news feed. For example, live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook — in fact, live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos,” wrote Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of news feed, in a company blog post.

Stats from Socialbakers appear to back that implication. Live videos reach twice as many people and receive 25 percent more engagements than native videos on Facebook, according to Moses Velasco, Socialbakers’ chief of strategy.

If Facebook’s algorithm does reward live videos that elicit comments, shares and likes, then Super Deluxe may stand to recoup the views it has lost. Not only that, but those views that remain views may be more valuable if they’re more engaging.

“The engagement rates and watch times were staying the same while the views dropped. And since then, those have been rising while the views stayed the same,” said Ghahremani. “So I think there is a shift happening where the quality of the views is getting better.”

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