Month: November 2019

“The video destination we are building at Facebook, it’s a separate and distinct video destination,” Birkeland said. “It’s not a library of video and just splashing video across Facebook. It’s differentiated, lively and specific.” He said that Facebook Watch’s approach to video is “active” and that Facebook sees it as a way to “connect people through shared experiences and a sense of belonging.” To creators in the audience, he implored, “We know we’re building something special, and we know we can’t do it without you.”

Previously, Facebook has invested in wooing creators by positioning Watch as a reliable source of revenue. Earlier this year, Facebook also launched a program to fund publisher shows starring influencers.

Despite these efforts, some creators complain of tech glitches and poor communication from Facebook. And some are genuinely concerned that Facebook hasn’t made Watch as much of a destination as it could be, so they’re less reluctant to build their businesses on Watch when they can otherwise stay on YouTube and other platforms.

“I feel like I hear them talking about Facebook Watch, but I don’t see them putting their money where their mouth is,” said Jordan Jacobson, vp and head of social media at iProspect. “Are they making this a scalable, comparable platform to everyone else in this space?”

Facebook said that 720 million people monthly and 140 million people daily spend at least one minute in Watch as of June 2019. On average, it said daily visitors spend more than 26 minutes on Watch each day. Facebook’s global user base across all of its brands, Instagram and WhatsApp included, is 2.8 billion.

Digiday spoke to four creators who attended the summit for their perspectives on what it’s like to publish content on Facebook Watch. Enhanced tools in the Creator Studio, they said, are making it easier for them to know who’s watching their content and to be able to modify or develop content that will get more engagement. Traffic sources, in particular, were a highlight.

“It’s game-changing, not just from understanding your viewers but also helping Facebook know how we can all use that to start learning how different traffic sources really work,” said Rafi Fine, president and co-founder of FBE.

Another publisher who’s licensed and sold three shows to Facebook Watch told Digiday: “Maybe in the past, the stuff people would talk about wasn’t as useful — it was more vanity stuff. But now the Creator Studio is giving us meaningful insights that you can derive from that tool that can actually help me make content and distribution decisions.”

Comedian Trey Kennedy, who primarily publishes his video content on Facebook and YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, said that looking at analytics like audience retention impacted what he developed.

“I noticed I had a big following in the heartland of the country, especially in the Southern region of the United States,” Kennedy said. So with that knowledge, he created a “Southern Sayings” video that “performed really well.”

Amanda Retke of “I Am Baker” said she used to focus on shares of her content, but Facebook Analytics helped her see where or how people shared content mattered too, especially in terms of engagement. For example, content being shared with groups that had a following benefited from increased engagement.

As Facebook Watch has evolved and matured, creators and publishers are also adapting how they develop content specifically for Watch, too.

Kennedy, who used to primarily post one-minute videos to IGTV, said that he had to start producing videos of at least three minutes in length when he started publishing content to Watch. And while that’s been more of an investment in terms of time and resources, it’s paid off.

“I was wary of that, but it’s worth it to put 20-plus hours into the video. The content was higher quality because I was putting more work into it and I’m getting better brand deals,” he said. “It’s been a huge game-changer.”

Retke said that as other platforms like IGTV have started to allow longer video content, she hasn’t had to make as many edits as before, like doing a one-minute cut for IGTV, 10 seconds for her Instagram feed and full-length videos or Watch. She primarily posts her videos on Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram.

The same publisher we spoke to said he will invest more resources into placing ad breaks in the right places for his Watch content in 2020.

With regards to monetization, the creators we spoke to said they haven’t experienced any issues on Watch.

“It’s been a huge game-changer for me, income-wise,” said Kennedy.

Fine said that he and his fellow publishers and creators are approaching monetization of video content differently than they were just a few years ago; it’s no longer enough to just get ads to play on your videos.

“That’s not the golden ticket we’re going after anymore,” Fine said. “What do audiences really want, and how do we build great content for a great community and have a great commerce component to allow for that to be a sustainable business model so we can continue to create content?”

Keeping the creator and publisher community well informed was another thing the creators we spoke to said was extremely important.

Kennedy said that even though he was one of the top creators of the now-defunct Vine, he hardly got emails from anyone on that platform.

Retke said that Facebook Watch is her largest platform by far and that Facebook has kept her well informed of changes, especially algorithmic changes that impact how people can have access to her content.

“I’m in it for the long haul as well,” she said. “Yes, there are slight algorithm shifts, but at the end of the day, that means Facebook is determining how people are consuming content differently. You have a better understanding of it, and I’m able to produce better content from it.”

As for whether they think Facebook is making Watch more of a destination and raising its awareness among users, creators said they feel like Facebook is trying to do just that, but they’re not sure yet if it will actually happen.

“When I think about their strategy which, to me, seems to make Facebook a destination for great video programming that competes with YouTube and also HBO, I wonder: Will that actually happen?” said the creator. “I don’t think Facebook knows yet either, but I think it’s the right thing to try, and I’m excited to at least try to do more with them next year.”

Jason White, Facebook’s director, North America, news partnerships, said that what Facebook is doing with Watch is to be a “place where small creators can start building an audience and business” but also one where “publishers can find audiences and community.” It’s meant to appeal to both, but, he added, Watch isn’t about “massive big-budget productions or a subscription model,” so it’s not competing directly in the streaming wars.

Generating more awareness of Watch and making it a must-see destination, however, is “Facebook’s biggest hurdle,” said Fine.

“They have the eyeballs in the way that Facebook works currently, but they need to figure out how to make it a place as a video destination where you come repeatedly for specific shows, specific types of content,” he said. “I don’t think they will give up until they crack it. They just need some time.”

Photo Credit: Facebook

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What’s more, there’s some evidence to suggest that many trigger-happy subscribers are, if anything, beginning to slim down the number of services they subscribe to rather than adding to them.

Scroll CEO Tony Haile suggested last week that this “paywall paradox” is helping to propel subscription growth for The New York Times, for example, which announced last week that it added 273,000 new digital subscribers in the third quarter to reach an overall print and digital subscriber number of 4.9 million.

Besides The New York Times, there’s a handful of other obvious candidates that stand to benefit, such as The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The Washington Post’s subscriber base has “more than tripled in the past three years,” according to the company. News Corp reported a 19% increase in digital subscribers during the third quarter. 

Smaller, more focused, and perhaps niche publishers will most likely find themselves sheltered from this dynamic as well. As people become accustomed to paying for content, publishers with differentiated, focused content are in a good spot.

So, as is often the case in digital publishing, the middle is emerging as a dangerous place to be when it comes to subscription products and paywalls. Second-tier publishers with undifferentiated offerings are not only going to struggle to compete with the heft of titles such as The New York Times, but the very existence of their products could be helping to create demand that others are cashing in on.

One publishing exec told Digiday recently that his company had launched a paywall with the intention of “figuring out the product” later.

In hindsight, that perhaps doesn’t seem like such a great idea.

The post The Rundown: The paywall paradox appeared first on Digiday.

“Our whole interest in television is about being in the living room, a place where Americans are spending hours a day and have been for decades. Our business is a subscription business, but we care a lot about driving habits. When is more time of the day that The New York Times can get from you?” said Stephanie Preiss, executive director of TV and audio at The New York Times.

The shows have already given the Times’ business a boost. In its most recent quarter, they have generated $48 million in “other” revenue, a 26% year-over-year increase that was primarily attributed to “The Weekly,” its documentary series that debuted on FX and Hulu in June. Through 18 episodes, that show has averaged 1.2 million viewers per episode across linear TV, on-demand and streaming, according to the Times spokesperson.

It is unclear how exactly the Times’ current slate of shows has contributed to its broader business. Making a direct connection between the shows’ viewership and the Times’ subscription business would be difficult in the same way that advertisers struggle to know for a fact if an ad aired on TV led someone to purchase the product. The shows seem to have sparked more interest in the corresponding podcasts and articles published by the Times, however. Amazon’s scripted adaptation of “Modern Love” led to spikes in downloads of its podcast and readership of its column, said Preiss.

In addition to extending its existing audience’s exposure to the Times, its TV shows, which stream on Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix, offer an opportunity for the Times to expand its audience.

“Our research does show that the younger generations are using streaming services [and] social at higher rates than the generations that already have had a long history and understanding of what the Times delivers,” said Anne Hunter, evp of strategy and growth at Kantar.

Using TV to establish a presence in people’s living room mirrors how the Times has used podcasts to occupy a place in people’s cars during their commutes, said Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development agency Twenty-First Digital. Other media companies, like Vox Media and Axios, have similarly gotten into producing shows for TV networks and streaming services as a way to establish their brands on the biggest screens in people’s homes.

Whether the Times’ documentary films will make it to the proverbial big screen remains to be seen. Times execs declined to share many details of their plans for the films, such as how exactly they will be delivered. However, they do not view the move into movies as removed from the company’s move into TV, though it is removed from the digital videos that the Times’ separate video department produces for its site and platforms like YouTube, said Sam Dolnick, assistant managing editor at The New York Times. “What Steph and I are building up is now a new unit that’s making work aimed more at the streaming platforms, frankly. We don’t really make a distinction between TV and movies,” he said.

There is a distinction, however, between TV and other forms of media that the Times has adopted, Dolnick acknowledged. Like other publishers such as Vox Media and Axios, the Times has found TV to be an altogether other business. Like other publishers, the Times has relied on outside production firms, such as Left/Right, to help steward it into the business while staffing up its own internal team. “I think we expected that TV would just be like one more step, but it feels in many ways like a whole other dimension,” Dolnick said.

For “The Weekly,” the Times has put together a story team that works with the show’s lead editor Jason Stallman and the rest of the publication’s newsroom to identify stories that would work in TV form. That team includes former Times columnist Dan Barry; Liz Day, who had been ProPublica’s director of research before becoming a senior news producer on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver;”; and Liz Baylen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who had been the director of enterprise video at the Times.

The setup has different for the Times’ two other shows: Netflix’s adaptation of The New York Times Magazine column “Diagnosis” and Amazon’s adaptation of Styles column “Modern Love.” Preiss and Dolnick were both involved in the production of “Diagnosis,” and Dolnick served in a primarily advisory role on “Modern Love.” But the Times employees responsible the text versions were the ones more involved in the TV adapations, Dolnick said.

The documentary films, however, reside within the TV unit run by Preiss and Dolnick. Kathleen Lingo, who had run the publisher’s Op-Docs’ Oscar-nominated series of documentary short films, has been building a documentaries team that is producing series and feature-length films for “streaming channels, theaters and all the places that documentaries are seen,” Dolnick said.

Opposite Lingo’s unscripted programming work on the genre spectrum, the Times’ TV unit has the editorial director of the magazine’s creative studio NYT Magazine Labs Caitlin Roper working on scripted programming. She is meeting with producers, directors and screenwriters about the types of programming they are interested in and then digging into the Times’ archives to identify stories that could be adapted in projects. The Times has already produced a scripted show with “Modern Love” and has “a bunch of stuff in the early stages of development,” Dolnick said.

However, for as quickly as the Times appears to be building up its programming slate, its ambition is not to have “hundreds of television products and hundreds of movies or dozens of things set up in lots of different places,” Preiss said. Instead, the company intends to be strategic about the projects it produces, as it has been with “The Weekly.” While the Times is producing 30 episodes of the series, each of those episodes are “among the strongest journalistic projects” that the Times will undertake this year, Dolnick said.

The post How The New York Times is building its TV business and moving into movies appeared first on Digiday.