With last fall’s formation of crew nine Media, 4 digital media organizations (Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Discovery’s Seeker) came together under a single corporate umbrella. Now the company says it’s seeing real success connecting with readers and viewers, with 114 million social media engagements in could — up from 70 million in January.
As group 9 CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above) put it, “We smoked it.”
however how meaningful is that number, particularly because it contains everything from likes to comments to shares?
“each engagement isn’t created equal,” Lerer admitted. still, he argued that “more engagement is best than less.” And he mentioned the numbers express that “individuals aren’t simply sitting on their phones and aimlessly scanning” on social media: “individuals are stopping and paying consideration and taking an action at an enormous scale.”
This additionally ties into one among incessantly repeated mantras in online publishing — the wish to focus on engagement rather than pageviews.
on this case, Lerer stated he isn’t seeking to make the argument that “We’re now not big, however we’re just right.” in fact, the company points to data from video analytics firm Tubular displaying that it’s probably the most high 10 media and entertainment residences online, with more than 3 billion views on facebook on my own in April. (And whereas group nine ranks eighth out of 10 when it comes views, it has the absolute best engagement fee among the many residences in that prime tier.)
“as a substitute of simply announcing, ‘hey, seem to be, we’re giant,’ we’re unpacking: smartly, why are we large?” Lerer stated.
He introduced that the focal point is much less on having a few large viral hits, and more on “elevating the floor” so that none of the publications are spending time on content that doesn’t get vital engagement.
“We’ve all the time talked in regards to the idea of no longer having virality be a strategy, but having it’s an outcome of good technique,” he stated.
And just as all engagement isn’t created equal, the identical is correct of the more than a few residences that make up team nine. totally different publications do higher on totally different systems — for example, Seeker performs better on YouTube while NowThis is more suitable on facebook.
Lerer stated that whereas he desires to make sure that “the editorial soul of each and every brand lives fully at that brand,” the company is also working to “create a center of excellence to take those learnings and transfer them to the other brands so all the manufacturers get smarter.”
This leads to some other large question: Is it unhealthy for a media company to count too heavily on other structures for distribution? Lerer stated publishing on social media is necessary for attaining customers where they are, somewhat than seeking to “swim upstream” — however he additionally mentioned there’s possibility for real ad income, both in the present (“We occur to be excited by making large amounts of cash on these systems”) and in the future.
“I don’t assume that the promoting options that exist on these structures and the type of profit sharing and partnerships that exists between distribution systems and content material creators … are those which can be going to exist one day,” Lerer said. “i think there will likely be extra price coming downstream to content material creators as time goes on.”
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