Remember the mid-2010s? Skinny jeans were still firmly in fashion; Tumblr was the coolest place to be; and publishers were, en masse, pivoting to video. Facebook, in those days, had just recently emerged as a media juggernaut—a kingmaker in the media space, with the ability to direct millions of eyeballs to individual publisher stories. When they pushed the publishers to turn their attention to video, the publishers followed suit.
And the result was an unmitigated disaster.
Memories of that era can still send a shiver down the spines of media veterans: editorial teams slashed and video crews spun up from nothing in the mercurial hunt for Facebook-facilitated video gold. That gold, of course, never materialized: it turned out the viewership numbers that Facebook was providing were wildly inflated. The audience simply wasn't there yet.
As it turns out, the attempted video revolution simply came a decade too soon—because audiences are absolutely there now. Since the pandemic, virtually every social platform has retooled itself as a short form video delivery platform. Young audiences in particular are spending hours per day looking at videos on their phones. The result is that, a decade after the first pivot, media executives are beginning to realize they need to re-embrace video as a revenue driver.
To survey the state of publisher thinking on this subject, EX.CO teamed up with Brian Morrisey's The Rebooting for a deep-dive investigative research report into the state of publisher video. The results, based on a survey of 49 media companies and a number of stakeholder interviews, are heartening—showing an industry in transition that is rapidly coming around to the centrality of video to future business operations.
The pivot-to-video hangover has passed
However poorly things went the last time, publishers are now fully cognizant of the fact that video is here to stay—and that if they don't get on board now, they'll have to reckon with the consequences down the line. In fact, 80% of respondents said their site is using video in some capacity, with videos appearing on average on 65% of company pages.
That said, these are still early days, and publishers are still very much working through the kinks: only 23% rated their site's video experience as at least good, and 0% rated it as excellent. In other words: publishers still have a long way to go on this front.
Video is a revenue proposition
Two things are indisputable: audiences want video, and advertisers are willing to pay a premium for it. But—as with anything in publishing—there are still going to be trade-offs here between UX and revenue. As it happens, publishers appear comfortable with this: in a scenario where a publisher would have to choose between the two, 73% said they’d go for more revenue (with only 27% saying they’d opt for better UX).
The fact is that audiences have a fairly high pain threshold: years of clicking through content has taught them how to navigate around the material they're not interested in to get what they want. According to a product exec at a major news organization—whose website deploys both autoplay and sticky players—nothing in the audience engagement signals has justified a pullback thus far.
Contextuality is key
The big platforms are able to surface content that is directly relevant to users' interests; their business models depend on sending users down hyper-targeted content rabbit holes. What is clear from the report is that publishers are eager to do the same, and in this arena one thing is all-important: contextuality. 32% of respondents cited it as "important" and 45% as "very important."
There is some flexibility here: with 41% of publishers citing a lack of adequate video content, one-to-one relevancy is always going to be a challenge, at least in the short-term. But as publishers build out their video operations and invest in syndicated libraries, this should become less of an issue.
Audiences want vertical video
Thanks to TikTok, Instagram Reels, et. al., vertical video is the dominant video form of the moment, especially among young audiences. Smartphones are the primary way with which people of virtually all ages connect with publisher content, and so it stands to reason that publishers would want to invest in this space.
Here, though, publishers have run into trouble: only a small minority of respondents (27%) currently deploy it, for the simple reason that it is hugely difficult to monetize. 50% of the publishers who use it said it monetizes at a lower rate than wide format and 0% say it monetizes at a higher rate.
"It still really doesn't monetize at all, outside of native platforms," said a product executive at a major news organization. "Obviously, the TikToks of the world are driving an awful lot of revenue through it, so you think it would spill over—but I don’t know that it really has yet.”
To learn more about EX.CO’s vertical video player, click here.
The way forward
Everyone knows these are perilous times in the media, with layoffs endemic and morale chronically low. In an era when publishing employees are always expecting the worst, video has emerged as a beacon: a legitimately viable new source of revenue that also happens to dovetail with emerging audience interests.
What publishers are in the process of finding out now is how best to make video work for them. There is no single solution that will work for every company, but it is clear that a kind of syndication is inevitable—even desirable—and that AI and machine learning have massive roles to play in facilitating the dispersal of content through publisher sites.
To explore what the future holds for video in publishing, download our full report.