Month: November 2019

Content from the Starz network is automatically exclusive to the service; StarzPlay International will also look to acquire new shows and the team also looks to acquire content from parent company Lionsgate when it’s a good fit. Starzplay had previously been available in international markets through other platforms such as Amazon Prime Channels and Apple TV.

“We are never going to be in the shoes of competing with a Netflix, or Amazon, or any of the big players,” said Superna Kalle, Starz evp international digital networks. “We consider ourselves very much a companion…the way in which we price ourselves isn’t an either/or decision for the consumer to make.”

Kalle said StarzPlay International has set a modest target of reaching 15 million to 25 million subscribers by year five.

Consumers in Europe subscribe to around 2.5 subscription video on demand services on average, according to Ampere Analysis. StarzPlay enters a crowded middle ground between huge global players like Netflix and Amazon and niche, specialist services that tend to have lower operating and content costs. That squeezed middle includes services like Rakuten TV and ITV-and BBC-run streaming service BritBox, which is also positioning itself as a Netflix add-on.

Marketing activity for the new StarzPlay international app has begun in earnest and will step up in the next few weeks, Kalle said. In the U.K., for example, Starz has run out-of-home ads to showcase “Pennyworth” and advertised the show on Amazon Prime Delivery bags. As in the U.S., partner marketing will also be a key focus and Kalle said the product is priced in a way that it can easily be bundled: In Spain, for example, carrier Vodafone is bundling StarzPlay with Amazon Prime Video and Movistar Series. Kalle said StarzPlay is also set to announce another global partnership in the coming quarter.

Starzplay International’s Distribution and marketing expenses rose to $6.4 million in the three months to September 2019, versus $0.8 million in the year-ago quarter, as the company prepared for the app’s international rollout. Starz had 5.6 million global OTT subscribers in the second quarter, according to parent company Lionsgate’s latest earnings report. Starz had 27 million global subscribers in total — 24.7 million of those were domestic subscribers.

Kalle describes the StarzPlay brand as “sexy,” “premium” and “edgy,” aimed at both men and women.

Beyond the subscriber goal, Kalle’s big ambition is to boost recognition in markets where the Starz brand is relatively unknown compared with the States.

“It’s a challenge when you’re launching new shows and building a brand from scratch internationally,” said Kalle, who has experience in this area having launched multiple new new international networks in her 16 years at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The Players’ Tribune will migrate to Minute Media’s content management system. This alone will amp up its audience, said Peled. The platform is optimized for SEO ranking, is compatible with external traffic sources, like news portals, and integrated with Google Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook Instant Articles.

Minute Media CEO, Asaf Peled said The Players’ Tribue had previously been “lacking some building blocks.”

“We can bring the depth of [The Players’ Tribune] content to the next level by attracting more audiences,” he said. “Brand advertisers are naturally attracted to the high-quality authentic content created.”

“The number one challenge was the lack of its own tech platform and owning the audience by external factors,” he said. “We are quite bullish about growing The Players’ Tribune’s business, based on early conversations with advertisers. I’d be disappointed if we don’t grow The Players’ Tribune revenue by 50% or 60% over the next year.”

The Players’ Tribune joins Minute Media’s two earlier acquisitions of Gannet’s sports news title The Big Lead and Dennis Publishing-owned lifestyle site Mental Floss. Minute Media also owns sports sites 90mins, DblTap and 12UP, both of which mostly post user-generated content. Across these sites, it has a global audience of 57.5 million unique monthly users, according to Comscore. A robust tech platform means it publishes in 14 different languages. The company also has a healthy revenue stream from licensing its content management platform to publishers like USA Today.

The Players’ Tribune should get a boost by several bit sporting events in 2020, including the UEFA European Football Championship, Summer Olympics and Copa América football tournament.

The pitch to brands is access to athlete-created content from The Players’ Tribune and fan-created content from Minute Media’s sites. The commercial team has been touting this combination to advertisers for the last two months and has won multiple joint campaigns, although Peled was unwilling to share brand names at this early stage.

According to sources, Minute Media is generating revenues of $100 million (£77.48 million) and doubled year-on-year. Revenue from branded content partnerships on its media sites is in the double digits, video advertising revenue accounts for over half its revenue, the rest from programmatic display advertising, said Peled. The Players’ Tribune is generating revenue in multiple $10s of millions.

Minute Media has over 200 people globally, bringing in the core Players’ Tribune team into its office will grow this by between 40 and 50%.

“There was no need for reorganizing or restructuring,” said Peled. “TPT is not a tech company, it’s a media company while we are a tech-first company.”

The change in focus comes as more publishers favor the regularity of direct reader revenue to the volatility of a digital ad market in flux, battered by disappearing third-party site-tracking cookies, tightening privacy regulations and threats from Google and Facebook’s abundance of logged-in audiences. Now, publishers are pulling every lever to reach core strategic goals. For the Economist, which has always charged for content and so has long ago converted its core cohort, the challenge is sustaining growth and retention.

This growth in referral traffic is thanks largely to increasing team size, content output and taking a more granular approach to how it resurfaces popular content on social platforms with subscriptions in mind. Previously, The Economist’s approach was to share more content on social media rather than to focus on the content that drove most visits to site.

“The goal has been to better showcase our journalism on social media by bringing together content and talent from across the newsroom and move towards a more fully integrated digital strategy,” said Young.

Instead of different editors publishing to different platforms, the publisher has combined its 10 social editors to all work across all platforms. Another 10 staffers have social posting as part of their wider remit.

While creating content that’s bespoke for each platform and tailored to its audience has been the recommended approach for years, there was more The Economist could do to differentiate the content published on each platform. Teams working across the publisher’s data, graphics, photography, video and radio departments collaborate to create more tailored content. One result of this is “Weekend Reads” on Instagram Stories, which it launched in April, showcasing six of its best articles each Sunday using images, illustrations, graphics, audiograms and slideshows, to encourage repeat visits.

“The quickfire nature and regular slot for this Instagram Story are designed to encourage repeat visits and build loyalty among our followers,” said Young.

The Economist is looking more closely at content that has performed well, for instance, its Leaders and Briefings sections, which cover the week’s five most important stories and a deep dive into a specific topic, respectively. The Climate Issue briefing has brought in the most subscriptions from its digital output over the past six months.

“Such data can help to inform our decisions on which articles we reprise, or put into higher rotation when scheduling social output,” said Young.

Instagram, where The Economist has 4.4 million followers, the lowest of all its social platforms, has been a key focus. The publisher began ramping up Instagram posts in earnest in April. Since September, The Economist publishes around 50 posts a week, in March this was closer to four, according to data from SocialBlade. This has led to an uptick in more than a million followers in the last six months. In October, the Instagram account pulled ahead of LinkedIn for monthly referrals for the first time.

As you’d expect, as the follower count has grown the engagement rate (how many people like and comment on posts) has gone down from 0.52% in December 2018 to 0.28% this October, according to CrowdTangle stats. The Economist’s most engaging post, with 134,000 likes and comments according to SocialBakers, was a contest to pick this year’s Comedy Wildlife Photography Award.

While softer metrics like follower and engagement rates can be a good proxy for loyalty, ultimately driving people to its site where they can subscribe is the end goal.

Previously, The Economist’s approach has been to share more content on social to warm users up, believing its journalism to be its strongest selling point. It has 1.6 million digital and print subscribers, of these 790,000 have a digital subscription, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. In a more competitive subscription landscape, social media content is playing a more strategic role and driving subscribers. The Economist is also using YouTube to drive subscribers, as part of a project funded by Google’s Digital News Initiative, where the video narrative points people back to the Economist, where they can subscribe, to hear more.