Author: rssmasher

A week after Instagram launched its dedicated longer-form vertical video hub, publishers are posting a mix of livestreamed content, repurposed vertical video from other platforms and original features.

In the U.S., Vogue posted new versions of its “Beauty Secrets” series with actor Lili Reinhart and footage of Kylie Jenner trying out her own makeup products. BuzzFeed has been posting almost daily from its main account, a mix of content distributed on other social platforms, series like “MeCrushMonday” and more experimental 25-minute livestreams such as one featuring someone folding down all the pages of a “Harry Potter” book. It’s also posting videos of less than 10 minutes across verticals like Tasty and Nifty that have been cut from other platforms.

Tastemade UK posted talent-led recipe videos plus series called “A Taste of London,” where influencers sample the best dishes from the capital. Turner-owned Super Deluxe is posting daily vertical cuts of talent-led shows like “Cheap Thrills” with streetwear fan Tabasko Sweet. Refinery29 is posting a mix of lifestyle tips and cuts of series like “Style Out There” and “Unbothered.”

In the U.K., Bloomberg posted four videos to its @bloombergbusiness account explaining complex topics in everyday language, like how the New York skyline evolved, repurposed from other platforms.

Typically, videos aren’t much longer than 30 minutes, despite the 60-minute threshold on IGTV, with a lot of content pushing the 10-minute mark. Publishers all say that more original IGTV content is in the works.

Publishers’ IGTV videos are getting views in the high five figures, while Vogue’s Kylie Jenner video has tipped 240,000, and a nine-minute film about ecotourism in the Coral Triangle from The Economist, sponsored by watchmaker Blancpain, has a view count of 1.2 million.

The BBC has 12 different accounts posting content to IGTV globally. A video from BBC Stories, following a woman’s struggle with polycystic ovary syndrome, has had around 60,000 views and 60 comments after a week, while BBC Stories’ in-feed Instagram videos get 1,000 views. The question is how many viewers will stick around beyond the initial launch excitement. “It’s new and exciting, but we’re also cautious,” said Rebecca Donovan, senior broadcaster at the BBC. “It’s too early to draw too many comparisons with viewing figures.”

For Bloomberg, the IGTV audience retention rate is similar to what it’s seeing on Facebook and other social platforms, although the publisher wouldn’t share specific view-through rates. Tastemade UK is seeing average watch time triple what it gets on in-feed Instagram video. With no plans for monetization, publishers like The Economist are extending distribution packages to commercial partners, but the platform will need more audience data to keep advertisers interested.

“This is a chance to tell a story in the way it was meant to be — no segmentation, no breaks,” said Mohammed Ali Salha, head of programming operations at Tastemade UK. “It feels like an intuitive on-the-go way of consuming longer content. It’s true to the mobile experience in 2018.”

For now, the issue is one of resources. Success in digital media relies on efficiencies, and re-cutting video for other platforms takes relatively low effort. “Instagram wants everything to look as authentic and native as possible,” said Kevin Young, senior social media editor at Bloomberg. “We need to treat each platform differently, but balance that with the resource we have.”

“It’s a challenge for publishers to not just replicate or use it as a dumping ground for long-form video content,” added Ahmad Swaid, head of social for lifestyle magazine Dazed. “We need the creative ideas to be informed by viewing habits.” Dazed, along with other publishers, is driving people from other platforms and Instagram Stories to IGTV. A six-minute film about openly gay South Korean pop star Holland got 240,000 views collectively on Instagram thanks to Holland driving his audience to watch the film on IGTV.

But the product can evolve more to encourage sharing and linking out to publisher sites, mimicking features on Instagram Stories, said David Alter, director of programs at Economist Films.

The attraction with Instagram for many publishers is in reaching younger, global audiences: 60 percent of Instagram’s users are between 16 and 24, evenly split between genders, according to the platform. Half the followers of @bloombergbusiness are in New York, and half are in London. Instagram announced that Stories has 400 million daily users, twice as many users as Snapchat, and daily usage has doubled since 2017 to nearly an hour a day, according to SimilarWeb data.

As more creators, brands and publishers flood the feed with content, Facebook-owned Instagram will need to show it’s diligent at keeping it clean. “So far, there’s been little talk of how it would monitor fake news or even taste and decency,” said Young. “It will be interesting to see the quality threshold and how Instagram will deal with the issues.”

Max Willens contributed reporting.

The post How publishers are using Instagram’s new long-form video feature, IGTV appeared first on Digiday.

Fox News’ focus on breaking news is dramatically driving search traffic. Search engine traffic went from a single-digit percentage of total traffic to more than 20%, said Fox News Channel SVP of digital John Fiedler. “Search used to be about evergreen content,” Fiedler said. “But Google has been shifting toward supporting breaking news feeds and… 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 James O’Connor, head of programmatic at Kiip. Our industry has taken great strides improving transparency in recent years, and it’s about to do so again with the IAB’s release of… Continue reading »

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“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Kevin O’Reilly, chief strategy officer at TVSquared. It goes without saying that a creative can make or break an ad campaign. TV advertisers spend millions to create visually memorable, emotion-driven and even humorous ads… Continue reading »

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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Outlook Hazy The fate of Hulu depends on the outcome of Comcast’s and Disney’s bidding war for 21st Century Fox. Whoever wins will own a majority stake in Hulu, and both companies have very different visions for the platform’s future. Comcast wants to invest… Continue reading »

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As far as launch parties go, Verizon’s September 2015 event for Go90 had it all: a Kanye West concert, a live performance of Funny or Die’s “Between Two Ferns” with Zach Galifianakis, celebrities ranging from John Legend to Shaun White — and a legitimate sense of optimism that Verizon’s ambitious new mobile video play could be the next big thing in digital entertainment.

The phone company wanted to be a media company, and it was willing to bet big bucks to make it happen. With younger video viewers increasingly flocking to YouTube and social platforms instead of linear TV, the time was ripe for a new video platform competitor, especially one that could offer great content from the digital video creators and media companies that young people were already spending time with on their mobile screens.

Less than three years later, that vision is dead, as Go90 follows ambitious upstarts like Vessel, Condé Nast’s The Scene and Samsung’s Milk Video as high profile video streaming busts. Verizon last week officially threw in the towel on Go90, telling partners it would shutter the service on July 31, closing the books on an expensive lesson that all the distribution might in the world (and a giant checkbook) doesn’t matter much if you’re not solving a real audience need.

“Go90 never really had a chance,” said Peter Csathy, founder of media advisory firm Creatv Media. “The industry never really understood its strategy. But, they happily took their money, with most reporting that Go90 overpaid for their content.”

A big bet on the future of mobile video
Verizon’s digital video ambitions ramped up when it acquired Intel Media, a division of the chipmaker that was trying build a web-based streaming TV service called OnCue. The trouble was — as Verizon itself later learned — Intel Media was struggling to secure the programming deals that it would need to launch a pay-TV bundle.

Pretty soon after the Intel Media acquisition, Verizon eyed a new opportunity: young people were not watching as much linear TV as they used to; instead, they were spending more time on YouTube and social platforms, watching all sorts of videos and shows made by emerging digital media companies and video stars. At the same time, these video makers were struggling to build sustainable businesses, as monetization opportunities back in 2014 and 2015 were largely limited to YouTube pre-roll revenue sharing, branded content and sponsorships.

For many digital video makers, Verizon came in as a savior. After witnessing failures such as Vessel and Samsung’s Milk Video, here was a giant phone company with a seemingly endless supply of cash that was willing to bet on digital video. And Verizon wasn’t shy about splashing around cash to creators for programming. According to two sources close to Go90, by the end, Verizon had spent roughly $1.2 billion, which includes the money it used to buy OnCue and Vessel. A source close to Verizon said Go90 costs were less than $300 million, but didn’t provide additional details.

Go90 was also cash cow for some video companies. According to multiple sources familiar with the deals, both AwesomenessTV and Complex Networks signed multi-year “output” deals that paid each company tens of millions of dollars per year to make programming for Go90. (Verizon has an ownership stake in both companies.)

Mobile was the future, but everything else was unclear
Verizon’s pitch, according to multiple sources who took Go90 money, was that mobile video was the future and the company would bet big to establish a beachhead as consumer viewing habits continued to drift toward smaller screens. Plus, Go90 would be a premium environment, unlike YouTube, which would mean greater ad rates. Go90 also licensed TV episodes and talked a big game about its collection of live sports and music.

In a previous interview, Brian Angiolet, Verizon’s svp of consumer product portfolio at the time, and the man in charge of Go90 since the beginning, told Digiday: “What we’ve been able to do is put up an offering that a lot of people can spend a lot of time with. They can find a premium level of content from [the sources] they visit across the web, TV and live.”

Multiple Go90 production partners describe a scenario where Verizon executives were so consumed early on with the idea of providing a large quantity of high-quality content, that they never showed any focus. There was no indication that Verizon actually knew the audience that they were trying to reach. Meanwhile, YouTube and social platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat continued to draw in younger users with formats and products that made sense for mobile screens.

“They thought people were going to come [to Go90] because they want to turn their phones and spend time watching a ton of videos,” said one longtime Go90 production partner. “But you haven’t asked if people actually want that. Where’s the market research that says this is worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars or a billion dollars — all on an experiment. It felt like no one ever did any research. It felt like they were creating a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.”

Step three: profit — but not quite
A year after Go90’s launch, content partners were complaining about video view counts in the “thousands,” and jokingly calling the platform “slow 90.”

Angiolet, now Verizon’s svp and chief content officer, remained in charge of Go90. However, underneath him there has been a revolving door of execs as Verizon has made multiple attempts at making Go90 work. A year into the venture, longtime NBCUniversal exec Chip Canter was brought in to right the ship. Canter hired Ivana Kirkbride, previously of YouTube and Vessel, as chief content officer for Go90.

However the new strategy, which Go90 called a “content sundae” approach, felt similar to the old one: original shows across a variety of genres and formats, live sports and licensed content. “What is Go90?” continued to be a questioned asked by many production partners.

There was some optimism among Go90 partners as the new executive team, which also included former Maker Studios and Yahoo exec Erin McPherson and Blip executive Steve Woolf, had a background in digital video entertainment. Perhaps, Verizon finally had the team in place to tackle mobile video in a smart way. The company had even hired legal counsel from YouTube and other entertainment circles that knew how to negotiate content deals, which meant Go90 began to ask for more favorable terms such as longer exclusive license periods than it had before, sources said.

But part of Canter’s job was also to “claw back” some of the money that was still going to Go90 production partners, multiple sources said. It had seemed that Verizon was getting pretty close to writing the whole thing off.

Taking the Oath
Earlier this year, Go90 was brought underneath the stewardship of Oath, the publishing and technology company that formed as part of the AOL-Yahoo merger. At a Recode event, Oath CEO Tim Armstrong was asked about Go90’s future, and said he was unsure how long the brand would remain.

Prior to Armstrong’s comments, Go90 had already halted new spending as the executives awaited their fate following the Oath merger. In and around Armstrong’s comments, there was speculation that Go90 would become a potential studio — under the Go90 name or a different name — developing projects for Oath properties instead of its own platform.

That seems to be the direction that Verizon and Oath are moving in. A source close to Verizon said that Oath is committed to live sports and original video across the sports, news, finance and entertainment categories. And some Go90 executives are being given the option to move to other areas of the company as Verizon preps to shut Go90 down by July 31st.

But even as Verizon and Oath remain committed to video, it’s still unclear what sort of long-term impact Go90 will have on the companies.

Digital video makers, meanwhile, hope for another big buyer to come along — maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg and NewTV can finally crack mobile and short-form video. Maybe.

“There is consumer demand for digital content that tends to be short-form,” said another Go90 production partner. “Go90 didn’t figure it out, Vessel didn’t figure it out, but I think there is room for another video service. It just needs to come from people who have real insight into consumer behavior, versus people who just want more ad revenue.”

The post ‘Never had a chance’: Inside Verizon’s $1 billion bad bet on Go90 appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook has hired one of its own harshest critics, Jesper Doub, CEO of German media giant Spiegel Online, to head up a new news media partnerships team that focuses specifically on news publishers and media owners. His job title will be director of news partnerships for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and he will recruit a team, the size of which isn’t yet known.

Doub will be based in Facebook’s German headquarters in Hamburg and work alongside Patrick Walker, Facebook’s director of media partnerships for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to sources. Walker will now focus on partnerships with entertainment media owners, while Doub will handle news-specific organizations. Nick Wrenn, head of news partnerships in the U.K., will report into Doub. Both will report to chiefs in the U.S. Doub announced his move to Facebook in a post on his personal account on the platform in May. His start date hasn’t been released.

“Over the past years I’ve been both an outspoken critic of Facebook as well as a passionate contributor to the Facebook Journalism Project,” Doub wrote in the Facebook post. “I firmly believe that by working closely together, Facebook and news organizations can and will better understand each other and find sustainable solutions for trusted journalism leveraging Facebook’s products, capabilities and joint ideas moving forward.”

Publishers have often complained in Europe that Facebook’s local teams can’t give the answers needed because they’re not always aware themselves, with strategy and the product road map led from the U.S. The biggest publishers will get regular face time with Facebook local representatives, but smaller businesses are reliant on email updates — often sent the day before a product update — with no further context on why something was changed, according to publisher sources.

That lack of communication with news publishers is one of the areas Doub’s team will focus on, according to people close to the situation. Doub will also aim to be more of a bridge to the U.S., ensuring Facebook’s local European teams are apprised of all forthcoming product and algorithm changes that will affect news publishers, giving publishers more notice and context around why changes are being made, and informing publishers how they can make the most of tools and updates.

The timing of Facebook’s charm offensive is critical. At Axel Springer’s Distributed Content Summit in Berlin last month, publishers from across Europe congregated to discuss how to make platform publishing work. One of the takeaways was that Google is far more responsive than the rest of the platforms, especially Facebook, when it comes to listening to and acting on publishers’ needs, albeit discounting how it alarmed publishers with its late policy changes for the General Data Protection Regulation.

Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times, recently stressed that same point — that Google has been far more demonstrative of its efforts to listen to publishers, describing Facebook in comparison as “difficult.”

Part of the challenge is simply a lack of resources. In Europe, Facebook’s media partnerships team is still small — at around 25 people spanning multiple countries, including major cities such as Berlin; Madrid; Brussels; Paris; London; Oslo, Norway; and Stockholm, according to people with knowledge of the situation. In comparison, Google has been around longer and has a far larger European media team. Google didn’t confirm how many people it has working on media partnerships in Europe, but sources put the number at approximately 250 people.

“Facebook has to start rebuilding the [business-to-business] relationship with publishers,” said Oliver von Wersch, a Germany-based publishing consultant. “A lot of trust has been destroyed in the past months due to Facebook’s unpredictable and unreliable actions. That will be a long way to go and is not only a question of top management attention, but also of operative resources, required in the day-to-day management of cooperations.”

Publishers have long felt themselves to be on the short end of the stick when it comes to the trade-off between how much premium content to publish on Facebook and how much they can monetize it. Facebook is working with 12 publishers, including The Washington Post in the U.S. and Axel Springer’s Bild in Germany, to test how its Instant Articles product can drive subscriptions. So far the tests have shown that people who saw subscription offers via Instant Articles were 17 percent more likely to subscribe to those publications directly from Facebook than those who saw standard web links, according to Facebook.

Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that its conversion rates on Instant Articles are twice what they are for a normal article in Facebook in the tests, according to the publisher. The next goal is to identify the users’ propensity to subscribe within organic traffic from Facebook, and use that as a signal to drive the growth of La Repubblica’s subscriber base, said Massimo Russo, managing director of digital at La Repubblica parent company GEDI Gruppo.

The subscriptions test hasn’t worked well for all publishers, however. Bild, for example, didn’t see much of an uplift. But the tests indicate Facebook is keen to listen to publishers’ needs. Facebook is also exploring how to help publishers grow their digital subscriptions businesses on and off the platform, such as testing a button on a publisher’s Facebook page that allows a publisher to promote its subscription offer.

“This [media parnterships] team has expanded consistently in recent years,” said Campbell Brown, global head of news partnerships for Facebook in a statement, “including the addition of analytical and operational support for our publisher partners, and engineers working directly with other engineers from news organizations. We continue to actively hire and grow the media partnerships team so that we can engage and better support even more publishers across the region.”

The post Facebook hires Spiegel exec (and sometimes critic) to strengthen relations with publishers in Europe appeared first on Digiday.

For the world’s biggest football clubs, collaboration is one way of countering the mounting power of Google and Facebook.

Launched in November 2016, Netflix-style football site Dugout has convinced 77 clubs in 19 months to regularly post exclusive behind-the-scenes content to their own channels. While Dugout has grown rapidly — it gets around 10 million monthly active users, who watch nearly four minutes of content per visit, according to co-founder and chairman Elliot Richardson — the jury’s out on whether it has a long-term place in the football business model of the future.

“When you can throw Facebook a bone and say, ‘We’re going to have exclusive rights to Usain Bolt’s first training session at Borussia Dortmund,’ for example, then they’re really enthusiastic to support what you’re trying to do,” said Mark Cocker, Bundesliga’s content director.

Past collaboration attempts failed in part because publishers have prioritized their own commercial goals over the industry’s future. While there’s nothing to indicate that football bosses feel the same way, unlike publishers, they have access to teams, players and facilities that can’t be imitated in the same way a news story could be.

“We’re unfortunately allowing for Google and Facebook to propagate monopolies,” said Steve Parish, chairman and part owner of Crystal Palace FC at an event last week. “We need proper regulation of this [media] industry to allow rights owners to get their fair share. … I can’t see how it’s sustainable for us to bring Facebook our audience and then for us to have to pay to talk to them — that model will get disrupted.”

“Clubs know there’s value in their behind-the-scenes content, but trying to build a fan base on their own around a few clips won’t bring the scale they need,” said Richard Broughton, research director at Ampere Analysis. “It’s a much more powerful proposition for competing against the duopoly if they build a larger network together so that it’s not a fragmented market.”

Whether Dugout can become that collective force remains to be seen. Execs who have either sold ads to the business or work at football teams have their reservations.

“I don’t believe the future is clubs launching their own platforms because a football fan isn’t going to go to five or six different online platforms to follow their favorite team or player,” said one media agency exec, on condition of anonymity. “I think what will inevitably happen is that the duopoly will come to some sort of arrangement with the media owners about where the content sits and how the revenue is shared.”

Another exec questioned whether clubs are prepared to share the amount of content needed to turn the platform into a united front against the duopoly. The exec said: “Based on what I’ve seen, I wonder whether clubs are going to want to keep giving Dugout content, given it can be expensive to produce the ones that get the most traction.”

Despite the concerns, Dugout appears to be in good health. Six offices are set to open at the end of the year, including in China and North America, to add to the 11 it already has. In the last six months, it has sold programmatic ads to more than 3,000 ads, while Unilever, Adidas and Samsung are among its top spenders, said Richardson.

“I don’t think football clubs see Dugout as the long-term solution to the duopoly. It’s more a testing ground for what future fans might look like,” said Tim Part, senior consultant at strategy agency MTM Sport. “While it may not pan out to be the next Vice Sports or Copa90, it’s good to see clubs recognize that while they’re competitors on the pitch, they’re not off of it. They have a global responsibility to grow the game for the benefit of everyone.”

The post Football chiefs look to each other to counter the duopoly appeared first on Digiday.

Publishers don’t like to talk about if — or how — they buy traffic. But following transparency measures Facebook rolled out June 28, it’s now possible to see how publishers are spending money to increase their distribution on the social platform.

Every Facebook page now has a separate feed, labeled Info and Ads, that shows all the advertisements that page is running on Facebook as well as Instagram and Messenger. Political ads live in a separate repository on Facebook’s sites.

These new feeds on publishers’ Facebook pages don’t say how much money publishers spent to boost specific posts or how many variations on a post there are, but they offer a glimpse of how publishers use their pages on the platform.

To get a sense of the range of publishers’ approaches to Facebook ads, on Friday we looked at the Facebook ads for six legacy news and digital-native publishers. For this analysis, we looked only at publishers’ flagship, not vertical-specific pages.

The New York Times
Number of active ads: 72
What it’s plugging: As befits a subscription-focused publisher, the Times ads focus on its subscription products, like Cooking and Crosswords, or loyalty-inducing products like its newsletters.

The Times is among publishers that complained that Facebook’s political ad archive unfairly and inaccurately flags publisher posts as political. The Times’ Facebook page isn’t promoting any politics stories in its feed.

BuzzFeed
Number of active ads: 82
What it’s plugging: Mostly sponsored content for brands, including Samsung, Adidas and the Akron Children’s Hospital. There are also several links to commerce content posts that aren’t labeled.

BuzzFeed was a pioneer in using Facebook for paid distribution and also building vertical-specific channels for distribution, making it hard to get a comprehensive picture of its advertising strategy by looking at one page.

Fox News
Number of active ads: 3
What it’s plugging: For a publisher with one of Facebook’s most engaged audiences, it doesn’t need to spend much to boost its editorial content. Fox News had two ads promoting its mobile app and a third promoting the return of Fox News series “Objectified.”

Business Insider
Number of active ads: Over 2,100 (We stopped counting to avoid early onset carpal tunnel syndrome.)
What it’s plugging: Mostly links to BI editorial content, with some commerce content produced by its Insider Picks team and pieces syndicated from publications like Reader’s Digest and Money. A handful of posts, including this slideshow of abandoned shopping malls or this list of the world’s richest billionaires, appear repeatedly.

In a statement, BI said it’s been “experimenting with Facebook’s capabilities and testing which stories our readers and viewers like best. The large number of ads that appear in Facebook’s ‘info and ads’ tab just reflect different variations of these tests.”

Ranker
Number of active ads: A lot (Digiday stopped counting after 500; a spokesperson said Ranker has about 5,000 Facebook ads running at any given time across its sites. It couldn’t immediately provide a number for its flagship page.)
What it’s plugging: Its own content, including some posts that are promoted dozens of times: There are more than three dozen different ads promoting this list of “The Craziest ‘Doug’ Fan Theories.”

After building its audience through search, Ranker realized a few years ago that its lists, particularly entertainment and lifestyle ones, performed well on Facebook, particularly when they were targeted to audience segments using its first-party audience data and Facebook segments. “When we know the value of different audiences, what we’ll do is we’ll set up different campaigns based on those different factors so we’re bidding in line,” said Mike Filliben, Ranker’s vp of audience. “What you find is some content is broadly appealing.”

NowThis
Number of active ads: 22
What it’s plugging: About half is branded videos for sponsors including Lowe’s and Air Portugal, and the other half is editorial content, some produced by its vertical titles.

The post Here’s how many Facebook ads some publishers are running on their main pages appeared first on Digiday.