Alayans Media Group is one of the most significant digital media consortiums in Spain, home to many of the country's most influential and widely-read publishers. Their 28 million avid users—totaling 90% of Spain's digital audience—turn to them for news and commentary on every subject under the sun: sports, entertainment, cars, technology, and politics both local and national. For the average Spanish news consumer, Alayans is ubiquitous—synonymous with digital news content for many readers.
And yet, in recent years, Alayans found itself facing a problem.
In part, this problem was endemic to the media writ large: with audiences increasingly fragmented across social platforms, keeping readers on-site for long periods of time was more and more of a challenge. And this tied into a larger trend facing everyone in media: the heightened demand—and increasingly, the expectation of—high-quality video content.
Video, Alayans knew, was a key tool in the online engagement arsenal: if the rise of platforms like TikTok had taught us anything, it's that the right sequence of video content can keep a viewer riveted in place. But, as hard as they worked to meet this demand, certain obstacles kept recurring—notably, the difficulty of offering enough high-quality video content to keep their users satisfied and on-site.
Creating or licensing all the content needed to keep their users satisfied would have been prohibitively expensive. At the same time, actually matching those videos to each article would have required the kind of time that Alayans' editorial teams—already stretched to the breaking point—sorely lacked.
The challenge: transparency, scalability, and ease of use
In just the last few years alone, demand for high-quality video content among audiences has exploded. This is, in theory, a very good thing—not least because advertisers are willing to pay premium rates for this inventory. The problem, of course, is that—for publishers still in the early stages of building out their content libraries—actually meeting this demand can be impossible. And as in any other business, if you don't have what your audiences want, they will seek it out elsewhere.
For Alayans Media Group, this reality was complicated even further by the sheer scope of their operations: they are composed of 15 different publisher groups, whose outlets collectively employ thousands of people and serve countless different audiences at both the national and hyper-local level.
What this meant is that any solution deployed by Alayans Media Group would need to meet three criteria:
- It would need to be transparent, so that every stakeholder—across commercial, tech, audiences/product, and editorial.—knew exactly what they were getting into and how it worked.
- It would have to be scalable, which meant it would have to be automated, because Alayans Media Group's editors simply don't have the time to manually pair a relevant video to each article.
- It would have to be seamless—i.e., able to boost engagement without disrupting the user experience with spammy-looking, auto-playing pop-up content.
How EX.CO helped Alayans join the video future
Across all three areas, EX.CO proved itself to be the perfect partner for Alayans Media Group.
Transparency-wise, EX.CO was able to offer all stakeholders a comprehensive view of their platform's operations and—better yet—was able to customize their tools to meet Alayans' diverse needs. That meant, among other things, helping to customize sales and working directly within Alayans' UX—two things made possible through clear and open lines of communications with EX.CO's team.
When it came to scalability, EX.CO was just as useful. Through EX.CO's machine-learning-driven contextual video recommendation engine, Alayans was able to pair every single article in their vast archive with a relevant video. These videos were selected automatically, with EX.CO's system swiftly analyzing relevant keywords, sentiment, and more and surfacing precisely the right videos to Alayans’ audience. As important, Alayans was able to tap into EX.CO's massive content marketplace—guaranteeing that supply could meet demand.
As for the user experience—this was completely unaffected by EX.CO's video player, which is autoplayed and muted by default. In fact, EX.CO enhanced the user experience, by embedding thousands of engagement portals throughout Ayanas' webpages.
Why video matters
It's worth taking a moment to understand precisely why all of this was so important for Alayans—and for media companies around the world. As Pablo Rodes, managing director of Alayans Media, put it: "Video is the standout format." Rodes points out that social media has permanently changed content consumption patterns, and that investing in video is essential for "attracting a digitally native audience."
There is a virtuous (and lucrative) cycle at play here, one well-understood by the big social platforms, virtually all of which have retooled themselves as short-form video dispensers: audiences like video; audiences are likely to keep watching video when the video they're presented with is of a sufficiently high-quality; and the result for publishers is higher engagement and higher revenue.
All of this speaks to the importance of dwell time in the modern media environment. Ten years ago, media companies sought one-off virality—stories like Buzzfeed's infamous “What Colors Are This Dress,” which could colonize platform attention for days or weeks at a stretch and rake in millions upon millions of eyeballs. Those days are, for the most part, over: platforms like X.com and Facebook have radically de-prioritized news content and truly "viral" publisher stories are rarer than ever. Success, in this new context, means publishers viewing their websites as primary destinations—places where users want to spend extended amounts of time. And in today’s day and age, nothing guarantees that kind of engagement like video.
What it all meant for Alayans Media Group
The results were extremely heartening, especially in comparison to Google Ad Manager (GAM). With automated contextual recommendations and a bottomless supply of high-quality content, Alayans Media Group was able to increase its supply fill rate by 80% and increase its RPM by 70%. Meanwhile, Alayans Media Group found that demand responded with unusual speed to EX.CO's video player, with a 44% higher response rate and CPM that increased by 24%.
Finally, Alayans has the supply—and the means—to meet surging demand for video content. Crucially, this functionally is additive—engaging rather than alienating viewers, and generating the revenue Alayans needs to fund the essential work of its reporters. Here and elsewhere, the message is clear: video is the future of media.
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