Be careful of bad advice regarding video
A good article I read recently from a smart person in the industry gave what I feel is some bad advice to publishers.
The bad advice in question is for publishers looking to focus on video to go out and license a few videos to test the waters, measure the engagement and build a strategy based on the resulting data. Don't do this.
The intent of the advice is to suggest that video can be expensive and you don't need to spend a lot of time and money when you are first starting out. That premise is certainly good, but the advice is misguided as I think most publishers will set themselves up to fail with a video licensing approach.
The two main reasons I dislike about the licensed video approach: Control and Availability.
It starts with control. Licensing videos will only give publishers limited control over their overall offering because they lose the creative control. That creative control is what makes publishers stand out and attract an audience with their written content, so it should be no different in video.
What happens when you have a few licensed videos that perform really well with your audience? Can you easily find videos available that would replicate them? And the same video performing well on your site is readily available to be licensed to all the competitor sites eroding any possibility of creativity or uniqueness.
I know publishers have read many of the same articles the last couple of years that suggest video is too expensive, that you can only produce killer video by hiring an in-house team or licensing repurposed videos is a real strategy. It’s information that seems logical, but it's just misguided because there are good, affordable solutions out there. I'm not talking about the agency down the street made up of a bunch of twenty-somethings with the latest camera tech, but rather an experienced team of writers, filmmakers, and award-winning journalists whose work can be found on the likes of Netflix.
That is the awesome profile of my team at Spacemob Studios, a custom video production studio specializing in production work for publishers that ranges from simple collage style videos to on-location with talent, voiced over scripts, music and more. We're helping publishers that sit at the top of the ComScore rankings as well as those closer to the bottom and climbing their way up.
Don't buy into the bad advice that has a way of becoming gospel in the industry. Look at the options available, focus on what drives engagement with your audience and let me know if I can help you in building or progressing your video strategy.