Grupo El Progreso is an institution in the world of Galician journalism. Its portfolio contains such venerable publications as El Progreso, Diario de Pontevedra, and De luns a venres—all of them known for their in-depth journalism and their deep insights across a wide variety of verticals, ranging from culture to politics to technology. More often than not, the news these outlets generate on a daily basis literally can't be found anywhere else: for the regions they serve, they are a singular and indispensable resource. And yet, until recently, Grupo El Progreso had found itself struggling.
No one could accuse Grupo El Progreso of failing to keep up with the times: like so many media companies, they were quick to grasp the growing importance of video to online media, and they had built out their operations accordingly. Their YouTube pages were filled with engaging, high-quality, short-form content taking in a vast sweep of subject matter, from traffic jams to festivals to local crime, all of it expressly targeted towards Grupo El Progreso's dedicated, hyper-specialized audiences.
There was just one problem: not enough people were actually watching this content.
Having turned to video to increase revenue, Grupo El Progreso was on the brink of losing revenue instead—video, after all, is not cheap to produce. They knew the content itself wasn't the problem: feedback from their audience was consistently, overwhelmingly positive. They knew, too, that the problem wasn't with video itself: plenty of news organizations were managing to turn video into a viable revenue stream. It was clear to them that the potential was there, and that a real audience existed for this content. Their task, now, was to somehow connect the one to the other.
And that’s where EX.CO came in.
EX.CO's online video platform: higher dwell time, higher revenue
We live in the era of the infinite scroll, when a website's success is measured by its ability to keep people reading, watching, and clicking. In this context, on-site dwell time is the all-important metric—and few things can more reliably increase dwell time than video. The big social platforms know this: TikTok, Instagram, and (increasingly) X.com are all centered around keeping users on-site through engaging short-form video content.
EX.CO's proposition is simple: this ability can—and should—belong to publishers, too.
Too often, publishers pour resources into excellent video content only to let that content languish on siloed YouTube channels or on little-seen parts of their site. After integrating with EX.CO's award-winning video platform—and on the advice of EX.CO's highly engaged Customer Success Team—Grupo El Progreso took active steps to change this.
First, to increase viewability, EX.CO's proprietary video player was made much more prominent on the page: readers would now find it after just the second paragraph of each article. Meanwhile, through the introduction of a sticky video unit, users on both desktop and mobile could watch and engage with these videos even when the video player was out of view.
At the same time, Grupo El Progreso linked its YouTube channel to EX.CO's platform. Suddenly, their large archive of pre-existing material was granted a second life, with clips redeployed across pages to heighten engagement and keep users on-site. Instead of relying on inconsistent payouts from Google, Grupo El Progreso could now reliably generate revenue from their own website, through both the videos themselves and the increased site engagement they generated.
This aspect is particularly important. For much of the last 15 years, the thinking has been that, by partnering with the big social platforms, news organizations can expand their reach and bring in thousands of new readers. The results of this extended experiment have been, to say the least, inconsistent. If we have learned anything, it’s that it is incumbent on news outlets to create their own content universes. They need to take the tactics that have served the big social platforms so well for so long and apply them to the unique needs of their own organizations.
EX.CO’s partnership with Grupo El Progreso shows precisely how this can be accomplished. For instance, because EX.CO's video platform allowed Grupo El Progreso to circulate its content archive contextually—matching videos automatically to relevant articles—users could be fed a continuous stream of content relevant to their particular interests. In this light, banked content could be just as valuable as new material.
Why dwell time matters for monetization
Underlying these efforts was an ironclad law of the emerging digital media landscape: programmatic video advertising is always more lucrative.
Traditional programmatic advertising will always have its place, but there is a reason that, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, digital video ad spend has increased by 16% this year alone: advertisers know it's more effective. They know that users are more engaged while watching video content, and they know they are more likely to remember it. The numbers are crystal-clear here: to cite just one representative example, one study found that the clickthrough rates for video ads are 7.5 times higher than they are for display ads.
What distinguishes EX.CO in this arena is that, using our machine-learning-based yield engine, EX.CO partners like Grupo El Progreso are actually able to optimize for publisher revenue over other sources. Some of our partners have even integrated with Google's AdX, allowing them to bring their own ad marketplace into their video monetization efforts—a constant source of struggle for many media companies.
What it all meant for Grupo El Progreso
The results, in the case of Grupo El Progreso, were undeniable. After a single week, video viewability more than tripled—from 28% to 88%. Video dwell time, unsurprisingly, rose in tandem—soaring by 40% in the same time period. The implications for revenue were significant: in just the first 30 days of Grupo El Progeso's partnership with EX.CO, the company's average gross RPMs surged by 700%—a testament to the effectiveness of EX.CO's technology and video expertise.
Achieving this transformation didn't require Grupo El Progreso to build out a brand new content strategy. It didn't require them to up their social spend or to invest even more in video production. The point is that they were already doing the right thing: the quality of their content was high, their audiences were loyal and well-defined. What they needed was a way to deepen that relationship—to keep more of their audience engaged for longer periods of time. The potential was already there—they just needed EX.CO to help them unlock it.
Want to learn more?
