Month: August 2021

“‘Flexible’ is now a tenet for any plan, for the next few months or for a multi-year approach,” said Kari Shimmel, chief strategy officer at Campbell Ewald. “There’s an expectation for just about every category that brands need to adapt in a real-time way to the customer’s current experience. It’s one of the reasons we are seeing a return to integrated teams, to enable the speed and creativity that needs to take place in these moments.” 

Needing to tweak advertising creative as well as media plans quickly given the state of the pandemic has been the norm for marketers and agency employees over the last year. Having to do so once again due to the delta variant doesn’t require a return to square one, since teams have already learned how to respond and adapt throughout the pandemic. 

“Most of the work we have been doing with our clients is to think proactively about how consumer behavior might evolve if more restrictions are rolled out, or if we have another lockdown situation,” said Carrie Dino, head of media at Mekanism. “In general, the last two years has taught advertisers that the ability to innovate and shift budgets and messaging in real time is critical to maintaining brand relevance and driving performance.” 

With shorter planning windows and built-in flexibility the norm for many campaigns, making dramatic shifts due to the variant (or for any other reason) isn’t as difficult as it was pre-pandemic. “We haven’t taken any significant steps to change our advertising plans because we have already been operating under the assumption that we will need to continue to be nimble in our messaging and media placement regardless of what happens with the delta variant,” said Dino. 

She continued: “Consumer behaviors and preferences are shifting faster than ever, and brands need to be able to provide a meaningful and additive experience for the consumer on any platform where they are spending time.” 

At the same time, marketers and agency execs are actively managing the impact of the variant. “Brands are currently reviewing and making tweaks to ad creative and copy on a weekly basis, especially right now as restrictions are rapidly being updated in different regions around the country,” said  Lucas Piazza, CMO of video production shop QuickFrame. “Thankfully, most brands and marketers have retained this agile muscle memory from the past 18 months so they are more prepared this time around.” 

That said, those that used “return to normal” messaging in the spring have likely stopped doing so. And many planned experiential marketing efforts are likely being retooled to be outdoors or rescheduled, according to agency execs. Some direct-to-consumer brands are also tweaking advertising plans to prepare for more e-commerce spending, noted Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing shop DigiShop Media, adding that brands have taken a more “month-to-month” approach to planning.

“The fact is, no one knows exactly how much delta will impact Q3 and Q4, but it’s absolutely necessary that brands reevaluate their current plans,” said QuickFrame’s Piazza. “[They have to] make sure they are remaining sensitive to what their customers are experiencing.”

The Delta detour on the way back to the office

The timeline media companies have set to bring employees back into the office is in flux at the moment, given the threat of the spreading Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus. However, many publishers set the day after Labor Day as the time to reopen offices, meaning if all still goes to plan, employees have just a few weeks left of remote work before they need to sort out commutes, pet care and the transition to an old work environment that may feel unfamiliar after 18 months of working from home.

The key hits:

• Publishers are pushing back reopening timelines amid Delta spread.
• Parents need to plan ahead for a return to the office.
• In-office requirements are met with mixed responses.
• Employees are faced with re-learning their work routines and juggling new responsibilities.
• People plan to soak up the rest of a remote summer.

The media employees Digiday spoke to stressed the importance of flexibility from their respective companies. It’s been a hard year and a half for people in the media industry, and being required to show up en masse isn’t ideal for many who would prefer to ease into working in-person.

“All of us in the media, we all want flexibility,” said Michael McDowell, a writer and podcast producer at Group Nine’s NowThis. However, there is a fine line between fluidity and vapor, and at the moment, some media employees are finding themselves in yet another fog of uncertainty.

Publishers push back reopening timelines amid Delta spread

The spread of the Delta variant in the U.S. has affected a growing number of media companies’ timelines for bringing employees back into the office.

• Politico announced on Aug. 4 it is putting its office reopening plans on pause, after setting September 7 as the return date. A new date was not announced.
• The Washington Post said on Aug. 3 it would delay its return to office deadline from Sept. 13 to Oct. 18. (On July 27, the Post said everyone employed by the publisher would have to be vaccinated by Sept. 13, unless they receive religious or medical exemptions.)
• The New York Times pushed back its return “indefinitely” (though its offices will remain open for those who want to go in voluntarily, with proof of vaccination). 
• NPR postponed theirs to Oct. 17. 
• Group Nine says mid-October is the soonest employees would be asked to return, and it will give employees a 30-day notice. The company plans to provide an additional 60-day grace period for anyone that needs extra time.
• Many media companies Digiday spoke to this week suggested they may update their timelines for an in-office return soon.

Local governments are also issuing requirements that introduce more uncertainty among employees. For example, Washington, D.C. has reinstated its mask mandate, requiring even vaccinated people to wear a mask indoors. But it’s not yet clear whether that means Post employees will need to wear masks inside the office.

“I would not like to sit at a desk for eight hours a day wearing a mask… when I have already proved I can work well remotely… I don’t think that’s going to be asked of us, but we don’t know at this point,” said a Post reporter who asked to remain anonymous.

Parents need to plan ahead for a return to the office

The Delta variant makes it hard to plan ahead, especially for parents, said Julia Dennison, digital content director at Parents magazine and the mom of a five-year-old girl. Sorting out child care in places like New York where it’s in “high demand” means parents have to “make solid plans for the next few months, despite the fact that there are these uncertainties,” she said.

For the past 18 months, parents have come up against the “blurred line” between work and life at home, Dennison said. Going back to the office is “appealing” to Dennison, who can once again separate work and family. However, Dennison enjoys the flexibility of working from home. She could arrange her work hours around picking up her daughter from school, and, without a long commute, spending more time with her kid. 

“It does feel like everything is happening at once in September: I go back to the office, she’ll be starting a whole new school routine, and all those extracurriculars, like dance classes, start again,” Dennison said. Next month will “feel like ripping off the Band-Aid when it comes to diving back into those old routines.”

In-office requirements are met with mixed responses

Hearst is requiring employees work from the office three days a week starting October 4, and work remotely the other two days. Dennison hopes the two days a week at home will make the transition of working from the office “feel a little less of a shock to the system.”

But not all are happy with Hearst’s return to work plans, as Insider has reported. In a statement given to Digiday, the Hearst Union said they are “dismayed by the inconsistent and unclear messaging we’ve received from management about our return to the office.” The union is also taking issue with the lack of “concrete updates” from management, such as seating assignments and which days of the week employees will need to be at the office, especially given the spreading Delta variant. A person familiar with the situation at Hearst says the company is still finalizing its plans to reopen its offices.

“People just want to fill their skyscraper with warm bodies again,” said Lizz Schumer, senior editor for Good Housekeeping and a member of Hearst Union.

“Coming together in our offices reaffirms our connectivity, builds our community and helps foster an environment of creativity and overall collaboration,” said a Hearst Magazines spokesperson. The hybrid model the publisher will implement offers employees “more flexibility” while maintaining “company culture,” the spokesperson added. 

But Adriana Balsamo-Gallina, a staff editor at The New York Times (another publisher that wants employees at the office three days a week), doesn’t believe employees need to be at the office to “succeed and do our jobs.” She was promoted twice during the pandemic. 

“I don’t think office culture is worth anyone’s safety, or the safety of our families,” Balsamo-Gallina said.

Re-learning a work routine

Media employees haven’t all stayed put since the start of the pandemic. Some have spent time in different states or cities and are now returning to where their offices are based with the expectation that they will open soon — and they will have to figure out new commutes to work.

Schumer moved out of New York City during the pandemic to spend less on rent and be closer to family. Three weeks ago, Schumer and her partner moved back to Brooklyn. She got a test run for her new commute when Hearst asked employees to come into the office to clean out their desks to make room for the office space to be redone.

Sarah Quinn, who runs the Instagram account of Group Nine’s animal brand The Dodo, also moved during the pandemic but only by a few blocks. She now lives closer to the subway, a decision she made knowing she would be returning to the office one day.

Enjoying the rest of a remote summer

The prospect of returning to cubicle life means employees are seizing their last gasps of life outside the office.

In the time between now and October 4, Schumer will take advantage of the summer and being able to get some fresh air during the day (not as easy to do when “you’re on the 20th floor of a skyscraper”), by going outside at lunchtime and taking her dog for walks.

Pets will also go through a shift when offices reopen

So many people adopted pets during the pandemic that at one point animal shelters were running out of dogs. Now, new pet parents need to adapt or decide to part with their pandemic companions.

Schumer and her partner are trying to get their dog adjusted to the two of them soon not being home all day. “We are slowly leaving the dog at home more,” she said. The two of them are spending time at coffee shops during the day so that their dog can get used to “self-soothing” while they are away. They haven’t yet figured out doggy day care or a walker for when both of them have to go back to work.

The Washington Post reporter is also figuring out what to do with their dog, who they adopted during the pandemic, and is “very much attached to my hip.” Luckily, the reporter’s partner has a hybrid work policy, so the two will switch off being home with their pup.

Will office culture return?

Overall, many employees are conflicted on the work-from-home period’s end and the march back to the office. They may be giving up the flexibility of working remotely, but they stand to regain the socializing of the in-person workplace. 

McDowell said he misses having a place to gather and chat informally with coworkers in person and grabbing lunch or coffee with colleagues. “That is something we have lost entirely,” he said.

Quinn wants to return to the office “in some capacity.” Office culture “is a big part of why I chose my workplace,” she said. However, Quinn admitted she was “nervous” about readjusting to the structured environment of working from an office, as well as morning commutes.

The hybrid approach Group Nine says it will take is “perfect for me to start out with, and possibly even stick to,” she said. “I’m thankful that my company is giving us the flexibility to find what works best for us personally.” — Sara Guaglione

What we’ve heard

“The Google delay is going to shift publishers’ focus heavily toward Safari and solving that problem. Two years is a long time away, so I don’t care what happens in Chrome tomorrow because nothing is going to happen. But Safari is a problem. So I asked Google project managers, ‘How is Google the ad server going to help me figure that out?’ They said, ‘Oh, good point. We should figure that out.’”

— Publishing executive

Ad buyers’ opinions on Gawker’s revival

When Gawker finally relaunched late last month, its editors asked a number of people — Tina Brown, Ilhan Omar, Paris Hilton’s publicist — what they thought of the site’s return. Illuminating as the answers were, we decided to ask some ad buyers instead.

Digiday spoke to ad buyers at two different agencies, offering them anonymity in exchange for candor about the internet’s reborn enfant terrible and whether they’d bother advertising on the publication now owned by BDG (née Bustle Digital Group). Their responses have been condensed. — Max Willens

Buyer 1

• It’s a very different management team this time. The history of that mean-spiritedness, [I don’t expect again]. The way they operate, especially Jason [Wagenheim, president and chief revenue officer of BDG], it’s not something he’d stand for.
• They’re gonna need to define what their position is in the market better, to make clients comfortable about what the new brand is. Until that’s proven, there’s going to be some threat of backlash.
• Could it fit into the ecosystem? The way Bustle’s restored other brands, sure. But this comes with a much different set of challenges. [Even] if it’s gonna be rolled up in a bigger buy, the brand’s gotta stand up from a brand safety perspective.

Buyer 2

• [The old Gawker] was usually kind of a dark horse candidate for lots of plans. If you started off by saying [to a client], “We’re going to put Gawker on the plan,” they’d often go, “I don’t know about that!” It always had a bit of baggage. You either had to get a client over or buy around, or give them some reassurance you weren’t going to be into something more tawdry.
• It’s not the usual thing I’ve come to expect from Bustle’s people. I wonder if they’re trying to launch it editorially and worry about the dollars and cents of it once they’ve got the audience story and the editorial voice down.
• So much more of media is oftentimes programmatically traded, I’d be curious to know how much of their inventory would get through a lot of clients’ keyword filters and brand safety checks. That’s something we think about a lot.
• [The old editors], they were extremely hostile. Editors would turn on brand work that was happening within Gawker. It was like, “Guys, this is your paychecks!”
• Now that it’s Bustle, I’d have to imagine the businesspeople there are a little bit less tolerant of editors turning on the advertisers without cause.

Numbers to know

142,000: Number of new paid digital subscribers that The New York Times gained in the second quarter of 2021.

14%: The percentage growth in BuzzFeed’s overall revenue from Q1 2020 to Q1 2021.

$900 million: The price tag for Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine, which just sold to a firm backed by private-equity conglomerate Blackstone Group Inc.

$102.6 billion: The amount of advertising dollars spent on digital platforms in 2020.

1.91 billion: Number of people, on average, who use one of Facebook’s properties each day.

3 questions with Gannett’s Mayur Gupta

The news publisher Gannett is aiming to amass 10 million subscribers by the end of 2025. To get there, it’s hoping to cobble together local, national and specialized audiences from across its portfolio of newspapers, websites, many of which until recently had run their own paywall meters (if they had paywalls at all).

Digiday spoke with Mayur Gupta, Gannett’s chief marketing and strategy officer, about how those targets affect the news publisher’s marketing strategy.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. — Max Willens

What does the addition of the paywall do to your marketing and messaging, around USA Today in particular?

The paywall, and the shift to a subscription-focused model, for us is a very natural and eventual outcome as part of our broader strategy to evolve from an advertising-led, B2B business to a consumer-obsessed B2C business. In terms of core messaging, nothing much changes. An important part of the subscription strategy is, as a nation’s voice, we will still have public service and safety information accessible to all users. That never goes away. That’s our core mission and purpose.

All of us, as consumers, realize that high-quality journalism, in-depth content, requires an investment. That investment eventually has to start to come from business models outside of advertising. I think it’s become very clear in the past few decades. The good thing is that we are getting that signal from consumers.

Which platforms or channels are the most strategically important to you as you pursue these subscriber targets?

As we are getting ready to launch our top-of-funnel efforts across the nation — for brands like USA Today, or sports plus, or games and crossword — we’re investing heavily in data and science and underlying technology to drive engagement and retention on our platform.

We have totally changed our media mix in terms of spending on paid channels. The blessing that Gannett has is that a very high percentage of our subscriber base actually converts on platform. These are people we’re bringing through the funnel of our content and organic search. But [we’re] diversifying that channel, mixed with paid social, affiliates, and strong investment on elevating our experiences.

You’ve got a lot of different things going in a bid to diversify revenue: Events, NFTs, sports betting, product reviews. How long will it take you to sort out how to prioritize the value of those and figure out how to allocate resources?

I’m not sure there’s a finite runway or a timeframe. We firmly believe that in a journey when you’re consumer-obsessed, you’re constantly testing and learning. These are functions of tests and experiments we’re doing. We’ll continue to do so.

I’m sure some of these will be hockey sticks. but we’ll continue to invest in areas like turning our events into digital content.

What we’ve covered

California Attorney General says popular, digital ad opt-outs from trade groups don’t comply with CCPA:

• For more than a year advertisers and publishers had few clues for detecting how California regulators would enforce the state’s privacy law.
• But now a fresh revelation has come to light: Companies cannot rely on blanket digital ad opt-out tools from trade groups to satisfy compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Read more about why trade groups’ digital ad opt-outs aren’t making the cut here.

Hearst UK wants all of its brands to have Good Housekeeping’s authority in product testing:

• For nearly 100 years, the homelife magazine has cultivated a following of readers who trust its product recommendations, reviews and seals of approval enough to spend their money on those tried and tested items.
• Now, the Good Housekeeping Institute has expanded into the Hearst Institute, enabling the rest of the UK-based titles to use the same resources, experts and testing facility that has strengthened the GH brand’s trust with readers.

Read more about how Hearst UK is monetizing the product review model here.

The pandemic sped the wrong things up for publishers:

• At the start of the third quarter of 2021, publishers are more reliant on direct-sold advertising than they were a year ago, and many incremental or complementary revenue streams now play smaller roles than they did 6-12 months ago.
• Subscriptions are basically flat compared to where they were 12 months ago as “large” sources of revenue, while branded content, for example, actually slid backward from that perspective.

Read more about the changes to publishers’ revenue split here.

Why two brothers are betting on creating new brands and e-commerce to grow their media company:

• Galvanized Media is hoping an old media trick helps to sustain its growth: Family. Former Bonnier Corp. CEO Eric Zinczenko is joining his brother David Zinczenko’s company as its newly appointed COO and president.
• Their first order of business is to create new brands and verticals to capitalize on traffic and revenue growth, the latter of which they say has doubled in the past year.

Read more about the brothers’ growth strategy here.

Here’s what’s behind the rise of custom algorithms for digital ad decisions:

• As advertisers ingest more campaign data and demand more control over how it’s used, custom algorithms for digital ad targeting and programmatic bidding have evolved and are getting more attention.
• Tech firms are stepping in to build algorithmic models based on advertisers’ measurement and audience data.

Read more about custom algorithms coming onto the scene here.

What we’re reading

The Continent’s publishing strategy directly uses WhatsApp and Signal:
The pan-African weekly has published 53 editions on WhatsApp and Signal to more than 11,000 subscribers a week who receive the publication for free, according to The Nieman Lab. The editions are sent out as a PDF on Fridays and the stories in each issue are designed to be read on a mobile screen, with mostly short news pieces ranging from 250 to 400 words. A few pieces are longer at about 900 words.

Governments are going after female journalists:
Governments, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, are using spyware and other methods in order to intimidate female journalists, according to NBC News. Among the tactics the governments allegedly use are hacking into women’s phones to steal and disseminate private photos that then lead to the women being harassed online.

Writers Guild halts newsroom union efforts:
The Writers Guild of America, East, is taking a break from its efforts at organizing unions inside digital media companies’ newsrooms, according to Poynter. Per an email cited in the report, the organization has reached a point where it needs to evaluate its future plans given how many editorial unions have sprung up in recent years.

Podcast platforms are crowding out small, independent shows:
As podcast platforms including Spotify and Stitcher load up on their own original shows, smaller, independent podcasts are at risk of being overshadowed to the point of losing listeners and revenue, according to The Guardian. In other words, podcasting is not immune to the central tension inherent any time a distribution platform moves into content ownership.

The Associated Press hires its first woman and person of color as CEO:
The A.P. has promoted COO and evp Daisy Veerasingham to be the news outlet’s next CEO, according to The New York Times. Veerasingham will mark the A.P.’s first CEO who is a woman as well as the first who is a person of color, continuing an overdue trend in the industry of media companies making their leadership ranks more diverse and inclusive.

While publishers’ traffic across the board has declined from their 2020 peaks —  through the first half of 2021, traffic across Parsely’s 1,400-site network is down 10% compared to the same period last year — the drops for many small publishers have been so steep that they are now behind where they were in 2019 in terms of pageviews. 

Through the first half of this year, traffic to sites that gather between 30,000 and 1 million pageviews per month in Parsely’s network is down 40% from the same period in 2019. For even smaller sites, traffic is down 27% over those same periods.  

The largest publishers in Parsely’s network — defined as those with more than 10 million pageviews per month — provide an exception to this rule. Collectively, those sites have generated more traffic through the first half of 2021 than they did over the same period in 2019. Gains in direct (up 79% half over half) and search (up 49%) traffic are the biggest reasons for the growth, according to the data. 

There are lots of possible explanations for the drop, some more benign than others. But the high-level data underlines the reality that publishers’ priorities must continue to evolve as the world fights to move on from the shocks of last year. 

“The sky is not falling…yet,” said Kelsey Arendt, data analysis lead at Parsely. “Fewer visitors might mean more valuable, more engaged ones, as well as just healthier relationships with advertising, with Facebook.” 

Treating news fatigue

It is hard not to look at the year’s data through the prism of the ongoing pandemic. Though the uptick in cases caused by the delta variant have put much of the country on edge again, sources at several publishers theorized that the arrival of the vaccine this spring allowed millions of Americans to step away from their computers and do something with their time. 

“I think there’s burnout from the news,” said Dan Petty, the director of audience and engagement at MediaNews Group, which owns numerous news publications, including The Denver Post.  “The election was long; COVID’s been long. I think people are tuning out and looking to put their energy elsewhere.”

Broadened paywall implementation is another possible reason. While most publishers committed to keeping news about the pandemic freely accessible last year, many also tightened their paywalls on everything else, meaning that as interest in COVID coverage declined, the effects of constricted paywalls remain: For sites generating up to 10 million monthly pageviews, internal referrals are down 42%.

“We objectively have tighter paywalls than we did in 2019,” Petty added. “Where we’ve really seen a lot of growth is our unique opt-ins for newsletters. Clicks from newsletters are generally on an upward trajectory.”

Drowned out

But the biggest dip for most of the smallest publishers in Parsely’s network came from social media, mostly from Facebook. For sites that normally draw between 1 million and 10 million pageviews per month, social media referral traffic in the first half of this year is down 31% from where it was in 2019. For smaller publishers, the declines were even worse. 

Because larger publishers did not experience the same kinds of drops, it’s possible lockdowns from last year drove publishers to produce more content, partly to keep up with the torrent of news happening around the country but also to keep entertaining everybody stuck at home. 

That increase in post volume was difficult for smaller publishers to match. 

“Post volume is a huge part of this,” said an audience development executive at one large digital publisher, who asked not to be identified while discussing the industry overall. “When you think about the sheer competition for social distribution, for search engine ranking, even distribution through third party aggregators…it’s become even harder for publishers who don’t have the resources to publish more.” 

Above and beyond post volume, search and social ought to be thought of as zero-sum games, a dynamic that favors larger publishers, Ranker CEO Clark Benson said. “The bigger sites are holding their own and the smaller ones are seeing less traffic,” he added. 

In either case, some see the drop as a necessary, if painful, step forward for publishers. “The industry has had a very unhealthy relationship with social [media] for many years,” Arendt said. “I’m wondering if these sites are developing a more healthy relationship.”

• $645.1 million in total revenue, up 81% year over year
• $532.3 million in platform revenue, up 117% year over year
• $112.8 million in player revenue, up 1% year over year
• 55.1 million active accounts, up 28% year over year
• 17.4 billion hours’ worth of video streamed through Roku, up 19% year over year
• Average revenue per user of $36.46, up 46% year over year

Watch time has waned

The amount of time people spent streaming video on Roku’s CTV platform has grown over the past year, but it subsided by 1 billion hours between the first and second quarters of 2021. 

During a call with reporters on Aug. 4, Roku svp and gm of its platform business Scott Rosenberg said “there is some seasonality” at play in the quarter-over-quarter watch time decline. In 2018, 2019 and 2020, Roku recorded increases in streaming hours from the first quarter to the second quarter.

Asked if the company had observed any differences in watch time between new and existing Roku accounts or between viewership of ad-supported services versus ad-free, subscription-based services, he said that the sequential streaming hours drop was “not attributable to any specific business model or content partner.”

In a letter to shareholders published on Aug. 4, Roku acknowledged “a broader secular decline in overall TV viewing hours” during the second quarter as pandemic-related restrictions loosened and people began to spend more time outside of their homes.

Roku is not the only company in the broader TV industry to see a slowdown in the first half of 2021. Both Netflix and Disney’s Disney+ attracted fewer streaming subscribers than expected in the first quarter, and Netflix actually shed subscribers in the U.S. and Canada in the second quarter. Meanwhile, TV network owners including Discovery and NBCUniversal reported year-over-year traditional TV audience declines in their Q2 2021 earnings reports.

During the call with reporters, Roku CFO Steve Louden pointed to the year-over-year increase in streaming hours on Roku’s platform and cited figures from Nielsen that measured a 19% year-over-year decline in traditional TV usage.

A bigger audience and a bigger business

The sequential streaming hours decline is the fly in the champagne for a quarter that otherwise saw Roku grow across the board.

The size of Roku’s audience now tops 55.1 million active accounts. By comparison, Amazon’s rival CTV platform, Fire TV, counted 50 million monthly active users globally, as of December 2020. And smart TV maker Vizio reported on Aug. 4 that its SmartCast CTV platform had 14 million active accounts.

In addition to attracting more people to its CTV platform, Roku is making more money per account. Its average revenue per use increased by 46% year over year to $36.46. That increase coincides with the company’s swelling platform business, which spans the sale of ads and streaming subscriptions across its platform.

“We’re just seeing strong interest in advertisers start to follow their viewers to streaming,” said Roku CEO Anthony Wood during the company’s quarterly earnings with investor analysts call on Aug. 4. In its most recent upfront negotiations, 42% of the advertisers the signed commitments with Roku were advertisers that had not signed upfront deals with the company last year. Wood also cited the launch of new streaming services as a factor, though didn’t call out any by name or category type.

Three years after Roku’s platform business overtook its device business in terms of revenue, the money the company makes from the apps available on its connected TV platform is now nearly five times the amount it generates from Roku-powered smart TVs and streaming dongles.

The Roku Channel

Roku’s own free, ad-supported streaming service, The Roku Channel, grew during the second quarter, but the company did not provide many specifics. In the first quarter of 2021, Roku said The Roku Channel reached 70 million people in the U.S., but the company did not offer an updated figure for the second quarter in its earnings report and declined to do so during the analyst call. Instead, Roku said in the shareholder letter that “a record number of unique accounts” streamed The Roku Channel during the period.

During the call with investor analysts, Roku executives declined to specify how much revenue The Roku Channel contributed to the business overall.

Roku has started stocking The Roku Channel with exclusive programming this year. In March, the streamer debuted its first exclusive series, and during the second quarter, it began premiering its first original shows following its acquisition of defunct Quibi’s programming library in January. More than a third of the people who used The Roku Channel during the second quarter streamed a Roku Original show, according to the company.