Month: January 2021

Following the first six-month-long phase of the partnership, which kicked off this past summer, Complex Shops saw a 300% increase in conversion rates after improving the user experience, said Tiffany Maldonado, Complex’s senior director of audience development.

“If you’re going to be in e-commerce, adopt all of those principles,” of prioritizing shopper ease and making the checkout process as seamless as possible, said Amy Adams Harding, director of analytics and revenue optimization for News & Publishing at Google. Publishers that have online shops have to “act like an e-commerce player.”

Among the changes, Complex added a “continue shopping” button in the website’s cart page, turned the rotating carousel of products on the homepage into a static click-through display and created a new retargeting email for when a user abandons their cart. After implementing the emails, in particular, Maldonado said there was a 425% increase in open rates, as opposed to the company’s typical weekly newsletters. Maldonado did not give exact open rates.

Additionally, the Shop team updated the search function to be more prominent on the site and mobile page by adding a magnifying glass icon.

“We learned through Google that customers who search on Shop website are three times more likely to purchase,” said Maldonado.

Ultimately, the search bar got more usage, she said, and while it helped lead to overall higher conversions, Complex was also able to track trends and popular items by seeing what people frequently searched for. Those trends are then able to inform what gets promoted from the Shop as well as what is stocked. Sneakers — a key coverage area for Complex Network’s Sole Collector brand — are the most searched item by far, Maldonado said. She did not provide exact search figures.

Additionally, using the NCI tools, Complex was able to determine that many shoppers dropped off after their shipping costs were calculated, said Adams Harding.

In response, Complex began offering free shipping on orders as a seasonal promotion — a cost that Complex absorbed.

This is the first Google partnership with a publisher to be solely focused on e-commerce, said Adams Harding, but similar to the other GNI audits, audience engagement is the leading metric. “It is the tide that floats all boats,” she said.

Moving forward this year, Complex will use Google’s metrics to see how editorial content performs to inform how Complex Shop is then incorporated into Complex.com alongside coverage.

The unique value proposition publisher shops and marketplaces have in the crowded and ever growing e-commerce arena is ingrained and devoted audiences that look to the publication to guide them in their shopping journey. While brands, like Balenciaga and The North Face, have their own online retail presences, Complex’s readers should, in theory, be willing to buy those brands through the publication’s store because of the brand affinity and trust that the publication has built with its audience.

That said, publishers like Complex need to “take advantage of the assets [they] have to reach consumers,” said Ben Zettler, a digital marketing and e-commerce consultant and founder of Ben Zettler Digital Media. By plugging the Shop or a link to a specific item in the store that is expected to resonate with the content in a well performing newsletter or on a video, the trust that the publisher has with its editorial audience could translate into trust between their e-commerce business and a shopper.

Beyond that, Zettler said that there is the opportunity to go deeper between these cross platform promotions by tapping into niche audiences and creating products directly for these smaller groups.

“Niche doesn’t mean small, but means engaged,” said Zettler, adding that shopper intent for these groups can be higher than a general reader. For example, fans of one of Complex’s video series could be targeted with house ads for a T-shirt that is associated with a series host. Eventually, targeting “enough of these groups can do very well” financially for Complex.

After all, the goal of the partnership between GNI and Complex is to “turn readers into shoppers and shoppers into buyers,” said Adams Harding.

Generally, advertisers continue to be wary of news programming, however. That could change this year if the news cycle moderates compared to 2020. “The hope is that typical government conversations go back to being tamer, and more advertisers will become more comfortable,” said one agency executive.

But having an established brand like NBC News and an inventory pool that spans traditional TV, connected TV and digital video platforms helps. Advertisers tend to be more comfortable running ads against news videos when buying directly from media companies because it can be easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns. Plus, some advertisers are coming to grips with recognizing they risk missing out on large, attentive audiences if they avoid news programming altogether. “The reality is the eyeballs are there,” said a second agency executive.

NBC News’s YouTube revenue increase helped justify the time and attention NBC News’s dedicated video team spent on YouTube. Berend estimated the size of that team to be no more than 10 employees whose purview spans digital video platforms like YouTube, streaming platforms like ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV and NBCUniversal’s own digital sites and apps. On YouTube, the team is responsible for packaging up NBC News’s videos, including determining headlines and designing thumbnails, as well as analyzing viewership trends, such as people’s willingness to watch longer videos like full episodes of “NBC Nightly News” and “Meet the Press” that are uploaded to YouTube after they air on linear TV.

From March through December of 2020, “NBC Nightly News” episodes average 1.6 million viewers on YouTube per episode, with 30% to 40% of viewers watching on TV screens, according to an NBC News spokesperson. Meanwhile, since the start of this year, 2.2 million people, on average, have spent at least 20 minutes watching episodes of “Meet the Press” on YouTube.

Those longer videos — as well as the live programming that NBC News streams on YouTube — likely contribute to connected TV accounting for a significant share of NBC News’s YouTube viewership. Roughly half of NBC News’s YouTube views take place on a TV screen, according to an NBC News spokesperson.

Coinciding with the rise in revenue is the climb in viewership for NBC News’s videos on YouTube over the past year. Through Jan. 21, the networks’ news organization has received 205.8 million views on YouTube in January, according to data from Tubular Labs. That is a 252% increase compared to January 2020, despite having only uploaded 381 videos this January versus 505 videos uploaded last January. NBC News’ YouTube viewership climbed dramatically as the coronavirus crisis escalated. After receiving 61.8 million views on YouTube in February, the outlet attracted 220.6 million views in March. Its video output also increased, from 571 videos uploaded in February to 714 videos uploaded in March. 

From March through December, NBC News’s YouTube channel averaged 196.2 million views and 612 video uploads per month. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. presidential election appears to have particularly boosted NBC News’s YouTube viewership. November marked the channel’s highest month for viewership with 375.9 million views.

The unprecedented news cycle of the past year — between the coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest after the killing of George Floyd and the U.S. presidential election — spurred the viewership increase. But, there were other factors at play. Live and long-form viewership continue to grow on YouTube. That benefits gaming streamers as well as news organizations broadcasting presidential inaugurations for nearly 12 hours, as NBC News did on Jan. 20; its stream had received 6 million views on YouTube, as of Jan. 22. 

“There was a material change in the last two years or so where it seems like the platform in general is giving a larger reach for live videos,” said Denis Crushell, chief revenue officer at Tubular Labs.

Live video has helped NBC News not only to attract viewers on YouTube but also to direct those viewers to its own digital properties. During live streams for major events, like Inauguration Day, NBC News uses YouTube’s live chat and card features to distribute links for people to download its apps or visit its sites. “Use of the live chat feature has been something we have employed a lot, and it definitely increases engagement,” Berend said.

NBC’s news organization expects to use live video on YouTube even more in 2021. That will extend beyond the NBC News channel to the organization’s other news properties, like Today. “Live is definitely the place that we’re going to grow,” said Berend.

Ben Smith has an enviable view of the current media landscape. Before The New York Times announced in January 2020 that the publication had hired Smith to be its media columnist, he had eight years as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, a period during which the meme publisher matured into a media company that retained its social savvy while also operating a news business. And before BuzzFeed, Smith had covered politics as a reporter and blogger at Politico. That experience helped Smith to see the coming rise of alt-right media outlets using social platforms to spread misinformation coming before many others. 

“I think was increasingly aware of it at BuzzFeed. Because we were swimming in those waters, we were very quick to see the rise of the alt-right, and we covered the hell out of it in 2014 and 2015,” Smith said in the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. 

Lately Smith has been reflecting on media in the early days in the internet. Specifically he has been thinking about he and others learned how to use the web to get around gatekeepers like the big, traditional media companies and inadvertently “opened a kind of Pandora’s box,” he said. He continued, “It’s not that we didn’t see that it had a dark side, but I think we misunderstood the balance.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

The balance between truth and virality

With news, often the more viral version of the story would just be the false one. So there’s always the temptation to jump on whatever tweet was most viral and write it as though it was true. We didn’t [at BuzzFeed]. I think we did a pretty good job of resisting that temptation. But I was not maybe cynical enough to realize that somebody was going to fill that gap and that the platforms welcomed it.

Platforms trying to stop the spread of fake news

This is a huge, historic and tragic missed opportunity for these social media companies over the last 10 years to have had moderation policies. I think Reddit was the one who got it right, or most right. Snap has done a better job than the others. But now they’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle, but it’s not five years ago. They’ve created these huge communities that now can migrate to Telegram, in particular.

The new platform era

The sort of pure social media era is over. There are these new, encrypted platforms that are going to be much harder to see inside for journalists, for anybody. But on the other hand, a lot of people who were happily consuming QAnon content on Facebook were also on Facebook to see their grandkids and the local weather and the sports team and aren’t going to migrate toward Telegram. It’s a very different world where you have a harder core of militants on Telegram. It’s a different world; it’s also much of the rest of the world.