Despite progress, there remains cultural challenges that could stymie their growth outside of the Far East. As Tom Harrington, Head of TV at Enders Analysis points out, “People have been trying to make drama more snackable in the West for a long time and it has never really taken.” 

Jen Cooper, a vertical drama critic and journalist, sees a change though, with experimentation and interest growing. “America is beginning to tip … people are aware of them and willing to kind of talk about it now. I know from friends in New York that [say they] see people on the subway watching vertical dramas.” However, “America is nine to 12 months ahead of both Europe and the UK,” she says. 

The primary audience is “women aged about 25 to 65 who were looking for romance,” according to Cooper. Henry Soong, founder of US-based microdrama company, Watch Club, notes that many in this category have disposable income to be spent on those microtransactions. 

While several apps have sprung up, there are currently two major players in the field – China-backed Reel Short and Singapore-based Dramabox. According to Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile 2026 report, downloads of Reel Short increased 115% year-on-year in 2025, with the researchers finding there were 2.3 billion downloads of Short Drama apps over the 12-month period.  

Unsurprisingly, the global media industry has started to take notice.  

Making mega money from Microdramas 

Microdramas are generally monetized via microtransactions; viewers are lured in with free episodes before being asked to cough up cash. Big name brands such as Shein and Crocs are starting to take interest though and back projects, according to Cooper 

Research from Omdia back in October estimated that microdramas would bringing n $11billion globally last year. They said: “60% of global microdrama revenue comes from subscription or transactional payments, often following a free introductory model.” At that time, China accounted for 83% of total revenue. 

The basic monetization model involves making the first seven to 10 episodes of a show available for free. The companies producing the shows then ask for “about 50 cents per minute long episode, or they charge you a weekly subscription, which could bring in $17 USD per week,” explains Soong. Some also provide the option to purchase digital coins or watch an advert in-app.  

The audience hook 

The shows find their audience through heavy marketing on social media, drawing viewers back to the platform on which the show is based. That is how Cooper, a bookseller before becoming an expert in the medium, discovered them.  

Marketing spend is around nine times the production costs. “It’s all about really aggressive customer acquisition, working around the clock with social media ads, pushing them out, seeing what takes off, experimenting,” she says. 

“Spreading on social media is the key. “You want the show to go viral,” says Dan Lowenstein, a director on a many vertical dramas 

Crucial to turning people from casual viewers brought in by social media into paying customers is the hook – the episode at which people are required to pay. This is not just a responsibility of the business team, but the creatives too. Lowenstein says it is “part of…my job to make that hook a reality. So, you can play with that a lot. And that’s the that’s the kind of good part of this format is that there’s room to play and room to experiment.” 

Cooper outlines that a show has production costs of $100,000 to $200,000. That number is ridiculously low compared to traditional film budgets. 

Costs are kept down by very quick shoot times. “The whole thing is that you have these six, seven days to shoot basically a feature film,” explains Lowenstein. “The business plan is about smaller budgets, less risk… you’re shooting on average 12 to 13 pages a day.” That is considerably more than on traditional TVs or movies. The vertical nature of the output helps with this. “You’re not seeing as much you can shoot faster, says Lowenstein. 

Another key element of the revenue strategy is making a huge amount of content, possible due to those low shoot costs. “There’s been a race to just put out more and more,” says Cooper. There is an element of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Cooper believes that “it does feel with some of the apps it’s kind of quantity over quality.” 

Niche content ripe for growth

The truth is, many of these shows are schlocky and low grade, with an emphasis on romance. Some even veer towards the pornographic. (There is a BDSM tag on Reel Short, for instance.) The acting and story lines are basic and hammy. The range of subject matter and quality may need to mature for the format to gain wider traction.

“I would categorize all of these shows on Reel Short and Drama Box as romance” says Soong. “And the reason why people are willing to pay per episode is because it fills a similar emotional need as OnlyFans does.” I’m sure various show creators and actors would dispute this, but the comment is largely a fair one.  

Platforms like Reel Short and Drama Box have a huge amount of power and, to access their particular shows, you must have their app. Of course, these firms, which, as Cooper explained, are essentially media ventures back by massive tech companies, can further exploit the IP they create. At a smaller scale, Soong is hoping his firm can build a social network around the vertical dramas, again keeping viewers on the platform. 

The content is certainly addictive. I began watching one show when researching this piece and found myself increasingly intrigued as to what would happen next. I later realized I’d watch 26 episodes of a certain show over a couple of different sittings, including navigating adverts to keep going. It wasn’t exactly HBO-style prestige TV, but I had been reeled in.  

While the recent growth of microdrama’s is certainly exciting, one high-profile failure looms large in media memory: Quibi. The app, launched by Jeffrey Katzenberg and led by Meg Whitman, which garnered $1.75B and folded six months after launch, was meant to bring shortform streaming to the US.   

Maybe it was just bad timing, as we headed into the pandemic and people were at home on big TVs, not swiping on the go on their phones.  Maybe the West was not yet ready to consume content in this way, before audiences became acclimated to TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts.  

Vertical dramas have been popular in China for a while now. Though it’s not yet clear whether their growth elsewhere will be a fad or a genuine shift in consumption habits, however the future plays out, there is currently enough interest in microdramas that the format is worth a look. There is a real sense that this is an area for creativity and a way to capitalize on the audience appeal of social vertical video.

The post How microdramas hook viewers and drive revenue appeared first on Digital Content Next.

Henry traces this revolution from the early days of streaming libraries filled with forgotten shows to the moment Netflix bet big on original programming. When House of Cards premiered, it was more than just a hit series. It marked the point when Silicon Valley investment and data-driven decision-making began to rewrite Hollywood’s rules. What followed was a full-scale transformation that saw the rise of direct-to-consumer platforms, the unbundling and re-bundling of services, and an industry racing to keep pace with changing viewer habits.

As Henry explains, the streaming boom has entered a new phase focused on business discipline. Subscriber growth alone no longer satisfies investors, and profitability and sustainability are now the top priorities.

The following excerpt from The Business of Streaming explores how those pressures are reshaping strategies, from ad-supported tiers and staggered release schedules to new debates over value, access, and creative control. It is a timely look at the realities behind the entertainment revolution we all helped create.

The business of streaming

As well as changes to the type of content being offered, there are changes on the business side of streaming too. Crucially, as time has gone on, investors and top executives have increasingly begun to demand a focus on revenue growth, not just the growing subscriber numbers, which was the original goal. Companies have had

to update their strategies accordingly. One of the key moves was the introduction of cheaper, ad-supported membership tiers from Netflix and Disney+ as they attempted to get more people to pay something, anything, instead of sharing an account with friends and family or passing up on the service altogether.

The challenge faced by all streaming providers is that as the number of services available increased, so did the frustration from viewers. Customers started to realize that the programming they wanted to watch was spread across a wide range of platforms, all of which required a separate annual or monthly payment. There is a limit to how many different providers people are willing to fork out for.  The later arrivals to the market struggled to make an impact. Indeed, some quickly became part of a bundle offered in conjunction with linear television providers such as Sky, who offered some Peacock programming with their packages in the UK. (The two broadcasters have the same parent company.)

Whereas originally a service would release whole seasons of a show at the same time, allowing viewers to binge-watch, they are now spreading things out and releasing episodes on a weekly basis.  For instance, Netflix split out the release of the fourth season of its hit series Stranger Things into two volumes – one in May 2022, the

second in July 2022. This meant that to watch it all as soon as it came out fans had to have a paid subscription for multiple months and in at least two financial quarters, a boost to the company’s results.

There is a distinct possibility that we could be returning to the kind of structure seen in the classic cable TV days, when the cost of a bundle was relatively high, but consumers got a lot of what they wanted from a few key gatekeepers. And you had to

wait a few days for the next episode of your favourite show! Maybe those water cooler moments have not completely disappeared after all.

While much of the attention is on visual content, the discussion around streaming should not forget the changes in music and other audio industries. When Steve Jobs finally managed to charm and bully the music industry into submission, artists were delighted with the arrival of the likes of iTunes. It seemed to solve the ongoing problem of piracy posed by Napster and other websites that offered free downloads of their music at varying quality. With iTunes (now Apple Music) and Spotify coming to prominence, it was easier to get high-quality music recordings legally than illegally. It has also never been simpler for musicians to publish music. However, even the biggest stars worry they are not being remunerated fairly for their work, an ongoing source of tension within the music industry.

Podcasts are historically associated with Apple and the iPod, but Spotify has, in recent years, invested considerable sums into the medium, launching originals and putting a paywall around some popular content. It had to rethink this approach amidst a dif!cult post-Covid pandemic market in 2023 and scaled back its efforts.

For some, streaming is another phenomenon altogether. It is not about big budget shows and movies but content produced live by online creators. This often revolves around video games, as people tune in to watch others play and pay money to support their favourites.

As ever, the story of streaming is not just about companies or content. There are key individuals behind these seismic shifts – the likes of Netflix co-founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht at Apple TV+, and Spotify’s Daniel Ek. They, and many others, have played key roles in how the public consumes media.

Streaming services of all kinds are, to a lesser or greater extent, the centre of most of our media diets. It’s time to really look at the fallout caused by the arrival of these services and explore the possibilities of what might come next.

Streaming Wars by Charlotte Henry (a frequent contributor to this site) was published by Kogan Page and is available to purchase now.

The post Inside streaming’s profitability pivot appeared first on Digital Content Next.

That fragmentation isn’t going away—but it is driving a new wave of strategy. To combat subscription fatigue and stay relevant, both streaming and publishing companies are experimenting with bundles, sometimes even partnering with longtime competitors. These partnerships are less about bold innovation and more about survival: simplifying a cluttered landscape for consumers, while helping providers hold on to their audiences.

Tom Harrington, Head of Television and Enders Analysis, told DCN: “You had this sort of a decade where the impetus, the direction of travel, was doing things alone.” This let companies take control of their IP and have a direct relationship with customers. However, “that was never going to be sustainable for most businesses in the long run, because most people don’t need 789 different services doing quite similar things.”

Christy Tanner, a digital media veteran who has helped create streaming businesses for CBS and others, and who currently chairs women’s sport focused streamer Swerve, shares a similar view. She believes that “from a consumer perspective, the space is too complicated. It’s a nightmare for consumers to navigate.” As well as the rising costs, “it’s just too hard to find what you’re looking for.” Anyone who has had to jump between three or four services to uncover the show they want will surely agree. Rebundling, if the services are consolidated into a single app, can help with this.

Jaanika Juntson, Research Manager at Ampere Analysis adds: “Rebundling – where streaming platforms, after a period of competing for individual dominance, pool together and form bundled service offerings not vastly different to those found on pay TV – is continuing to play a key role in streaming services’ subscriber growth.” Essentially, these companies need to work together to keep drawing viewers in. Working with rivals can lead to tricky situations though. NBC and YouTube only recently ended a fraught negotiation, with NBC programming now back on the popular platform.

In the end, though, it is a numbers game. “If you are not in the top tier of streaming services in terms of number of subscribers, then there’s not enough money in the world that’s going to propel you into the top tier,” says Tanner. “If subscribers are only going to subscribe to five, let’s say, if you’re number six or seven, you have to bundle.”

Bundling with friends and enemies

As a result of the above, we are seeing various deals done. In the UK, ITV and Disney struck an arrangement whereby some of the other’s content would be available on the rival platform – ITVX and Disney+ respectively. Making the announcement, Kevin Lygo, Managing Director of Media and Entertainment at ITV, described the strategic partnership as a “mutually beneficial alliance,” adding that it “allows us to show our complementary audiences a specially selected collection of titles.” The argument is that strategic rebundling makes everyone – company and customer alike – a winner.

Elsewhere, Netflix is hosting live programming from TF1 in France. More dramatically, Disney’s ESPN bundled with Fox One, a product offering both complimentary sports rights and Fox News.

Disney is also at the heart of perhaps the most compelling streaming bundle. It is offering Disney+, Hulu and the new ESPN app for one monthly payment. There are various options. But the most straightforward bundle, which has Disney+ (no ads), Hulu (No ads) and ESPN Select, costs $26.99 (rising to $29.99 later this month.) If you want that bundle with ESPN Unlimited, it’s $35.99 a month. The Unlimited Premium version, which removes ads from Disney+ and Hulu, costs $44.99.

This bundle illustrates a few things. Firstly, The Walt Disney company is in an incredibly powerful position, given the assets it holds. Secondly, it’s lot easier to offer a bundle if the company own all the services within it. Thirdly, rebundling doesn’t totally clear up the landscape for the consumer. I counted five different bundles that include all three services and a further two that include just Disney+ and Hulu. There are also options that replace ESPN with HBO Max. You need to login to all the separate apps too. Are you keeping up at the back?

As we see with the Fox and ESPN tie-up, companies not under the same parent company can also bundle. “The rationale around that is always incremental reach,” says Harrington.  For instance, in the UK, customers can buy a package that includes Sky Cinema and Paramount+. The telco’s are part of the picture too. Three is offering access to Paramount+. I got Netflix included in my internet and TV bundle from EE and can get Disney+ for free via an annual Uber One subscription.

Building cross-business relationships is no easy task, especially in the world of live sports. Not only do the parties involved have to agree, but so do the regulators. In January, Venu, a long-discussed streaming product that would have brought fans sports coverage from ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery, collapsed after legal challenge from Fubo. In the end, Disney ended up pairing its Hulu + Live TV business with Fubo.

Bundling the news

It is not only streaming services getting into bundling, however. Written news outlets are getting into bundles too.

Han-Menno Depeweg, Chief Digital Officer at Mediahuis Group outlined how his firm is bundling news outlets that it runs in Holland and Belgium. “We’re trying to bundle national news with regional news and vice versa,” he says. If someone in Holland takes out a subscription to a Dutch national newspaper that Mediahuis runs, they also have the option to bundle that in with a regional outlet. (These bundles cannot be done across borders i.e. you cannot bundle a Dutch publication with a Belgium one.)

Depeweg explains that the company does this so that one of the limited number of subscriptions a user has is with Mediahuis, and “if you can read the regional news from your region within our ecosystem, that means that you will probably stay a subscriber longer.”

The tricky thing here is setting the right price. “Pricing here is it’s mostly about cannibalization,” notes Depeweg. You don’t want to set the price point of a bundle at such a level that it makes paying for your other products unappealing. In the case of Mediahuis, “you need a Plus subscription just to get a higher tier to get into the ecosystem, and that way we leverage the subscription pricing.”

The New York Times has been hugely successful in bundling its products. From combining games, cooking and news, to making The Athletic and Wirecutter part of its subscription offering, The Gray Lady has become expert at leveraging all the assets at its disposal to drive customer and revenue growth.

Bundling won’t reverse fragmentation—but it might just keep audiences from checking out completely. As attention becomes harder to earn, simplicity might be the smartest bet in the streaming wars ahead.

The path forward is clear: make bundling work smarter, not just bigger. For media leaders, this means rethinking siloed business models, pricing strategies, and even long-standing rivalries. It has to be about providing audiences with more value for less hassle. The companies that deliver that will be the ones that remain essential, even in an age of endless choice.

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Substack is easy to use and has developed its own network. Authors and publications recommend one another, which helps drive audience growth. And, importantly, subscriber data, notably email addresses, can be exported, for free, at any time. However, there are concerns that all Substack newsletters look the same, which may dampen brand affinity. And, more significantly, some worry that publishers are being dragged into yet another dead-end platform relationship.

An effective email tool with revenue benefits

Dominic Ponsford, editor of Press Gazette, moved his outlet’s daily newsletter onto Substack. He says there are various benefits to doing so: “Number one, it’s free. If you’re not selling subscriptions through it and just using it as an email delivery platform, it’s free.”

However, if you do sell subscriptions, Substack takes 10%, with payments processor Stripe taking an additional cut.

Ponsford adds that Substack is “extremely good at sending emails,” by which he means his content generally gets whitelisted, arriving in inboxes as it should. This is not necessarily the case with other email distribution systems.

The daily email is free “because it’s sort of top of the funnel, especially since we started charging for the website,” explains Ponsford. The fact that it doesn’t rely on newsletter subscriptions does not prevent Press Gazette from monetizing its emails on Substack though. The publication sells newsletter advertising directly, from which they keep all the revenue.

Doomberg is one of Substack’s success stories, regularly appearing in the top 10 finance newsletter leaderboard. The writers are anonymous, appearing publicly only as a wide-eyed green chicken. The voice behind the avatar tellsDCN that “we saw early on, through our consulting in this space, that that Substack had a winning product.” (Indeed, the Doomberg team have such confidence in the product that they invested in the company during an author-led funding round.)

They charge a high subscription fee: $300 a year for the standard tier, $1,200 for the pro tier. This means they turn a significant amount of money over to Substack. However, the team are not looking to leave. They feel a sense of personal loyalty to the company through which they have built “life-changing wealth,” and still have “have an 85% operating margin business,” when all the subscriptions are processed.

Audience growth from the network effect

One key feature that both Ponsford and Doomberg highlight is the network effect within Substack. Writers can recommend other newsletters, meaning that when someone signs up to one, they can easily subscribe to those that are recommended too, fuelling growth.

Ponsford says that while most Press Gazette sign-ups come from its website, a meaningful amount also come via Substack. Doomberg says that even as that publication launched, Substack was “winning the network effect for Internet writing, and they were offering good discoverability tools”. This can be of huge benefit both to startups and traditional publishers losing traffic as a result of Google changes.

This may explain why Reach has chosen to publish a number of newsletters using Substack. The company, which runs both national and local outlets, has around 450 newsletters, both paid and free on Substack. Some are by named expert writers, others cover specific topics.

In June, Jenna Thompson, audience and content director for secure audiences at Reach, told The Publisher Newsletter Summit that the free newsletters help build a relationship with readers. “We’re demonstrating to the readers who are signing up for that, that actually we are providing all of the best information that there is to know about this topic,” she said.

The Royalist newsletter from The Daily Beast is now on Substack, as is some content from the Daily Mail.

Substack alternatives vie for market share

Not everyone is as keen to embrace Substack though. When he left CNN to start his own newsletter, media reporter Oliver Darcy chose to use rival service Beehiiv. He explains that he chose Beehiiv “because I wanted Status to have its own unique individual identity, and Beehiiv’s tools allow you to create an entirely custom website, an entirely custom newsletter that has its own unique identity and feel… every Substack looks the same.”

This is not something that concerns Ponsford from Press Gazette . “You’ve got the Press Gazette masthead on there… people are probably overthinking an email… if it’s got headlines and words and photographs in it… that’s all good” he says.

Access to advertising might be another key factor for a publisher debating how to do newsletters. Substack currently has no advertising network, although “I suspect we’ll see ads on Substack,” Darcy tells DCN.

Other platforms, including Beehiiv and Kit, already have such functionality. Programmatic advertising and sponsorship opportunities are extremely helpful for independent writers (like me), though, probably less so for a major publishing seeking a newsletter platform.

Substack: Just another platform?

Over time, Substack has gone from being an email, podcast and subscription management tool to something far broader. Substack has long offered the ability to publish podcasts as well as words, but it now has video tools too. On the back of a $100 million funding round last month, it is reportedly looking into launching its own advertising network too, making this an important moment for media companies of all kinds to assess its value to them.

Substack also offers chat functionality, and a Notes tool akin to Twitter.  When combined with its app, it’s all starting to feel rather like a social network.

According to Ponsford, who keeps a close eye on such things: “The big brands, I think they just see it as another platform to be on, to spread their bets, like Twitter, Facebook… I think it’s sudden it’s got big enough now that they feel it’s something they need.”

Substack undoubtedly has a lot to offer publishers of all sizes, whether they use all its functionality or just send emails. While publishers can access crucial user data, they must be wary of launching any products built on a third-party platform, given the ever-gr owing importance of having a direct relationship with your audience. Media companies need to understand how best to leverage platforms to reach new audiences alongside building brand loyalty, and not risk diluting it at the hands of another platform promising to solve all their problems.

The post Publishers weigh Substack opportunity and risk appeared first on Digital Content Next.

Three years on, the Lionesses are set to defend their crown in Switzerland next month, and the appetite for women’s sport has never been greater. Whether you’re a broadcast, digital or print outlet, female athletes, the stories around them and the competitions they participate in provide the opportunity to attract new viewers. Revenue can take time to build, but the appetite is there. And, by failing to invest and get involved in the coverage now, there is the real risk of being left out of a crucial growth area that serves as a cost-effective way to get into showing live sports.

Expansion drive in women’s sports

On Tuesday, the Women’s Super League, the top female domestic league in England, announced that it is expanding from 12 to 14 teams for the 2026/2027 season. In the U.S., a peak of 2.8 million tuned in to watch Caitlin Clark return from injury on Saturday as she helped the Indiana Fever beat the New York Liberty. American tennis star Coco Gauff’s win over Roland Garros was watched by 1.4 million, a 94% increase over  the previous year.

Francois Goddard, an analyst at Enders Analysis, noted that women’s football received a bump from the 2022 tournament. It looks like the same thing could happen again at the end of this summer too. With this in mind, the moment for companies to strike is now, according to The Athletic’s women’s football writer Megan Feringa. “If anyone is looking at the summer and hasn’t already assembled at least a one-person team, but ideally, more than that, I think they’re going to get to mid-July and think, oh shoot, we are so late on this,” she told Digital Content Next.

There are lots of reasons why women’s sports provide such an exciting opportunity for media companies. To start, while there is some crossover, women’s sports tend to attract a different type of audience from men’s sports, which lends them a family-friendly reputation. “I think we do see that in general women’s sports competitions, fans over index for having children in their households,” says Danni Moore, Senior Analyst at Ampere’s Analysis. This means streamers and TV could bring in the wider family audiences to their service by investing in women’s sports. (And this also offers a fresh and appealing audience for advertisers.)

Rights heat up

Another sign that moving into women’s athletics now makes sense is that the cost of female sports rights is already starting to go up. “The WSL, I think the women’s Bundesliga and the Spanish Liga F, they’ve all gone up,” according to Moore. However, they are still low-cost relative to their male equivalents, which provides a great entry point for streamers looking to get into the live sports game. “Now it’s a good time to get in because they are cheaper,” she says, “but if the prices do go up in the future, [media companies would] be missing that opportunity.”

This all helps explain why Disney+ has become the home of Women’s Champions League soccer in Europe. It has taken the rights previously owned by Dazn for an unknown prize in a five-year deal. ESPN, Disney’s multiplatform sports brand, will produce all live matches for Disney+ with commentary offered in multiple languages, alongside pre- and post-game programming. The broadcasts are set to launch in October, with no additional subscription cost for viewers to access the games.

It’s a good move for Disney, according to Goddard, because the company “needs more content in Europe, more local content and more regular content.”

The pan-European tournament ticks all those boxes. It also allows a platform that has not shown live sport in a mass way before to dip its toe into the water without splashing out huge amounts of cash.

The excitement around women’s sports goes beyond soccer and basketball though. “What if we look at women’s hockey,” says Feringa. “What if we look at women’s softball, cricket, rugby? You’ve got Ilona Maher, who has sort of exploded the rugby scene,” she adds. “It seems inconceivable that people don’t want to jump into this space. It just feels like an obvious win”

Adland’s interest increases

Advertisers are increasingly interested in women’s sport too. In the age of subscriptions and streaming, live sports are still a popular placement for advertising. “This makes it even more attractive as an option for local, regular content,” says Goddard. As with the price of the rights, the cost of advertising against women’s sport is understood to be less than in men’s sports, providing marketers and brands with a way to make their money go further in the sports space.

Rihanna’s brand Fenty Beauty has signed a sponsorship deal with the New York Liberty, the first time it has moved into marketing withing sports and Feringa notes:

“The [National Women’s Soccer League] NWSL and the WNBA have done such a fantastic job in terms of sort of aligning themselves with brands, and vice versa, brands aligning themselves with different sports and different teams.”

With the WNBA continuing to dominate the headlines, the women’s Euro’s set to bring some of the best in the world together. And there’s so much more to come in this booming space. Thus, media companies of all kinds need to think about how they are going to show up for female athletics to capture engaged audiences and advertisers seeking family-friendly fare.

Already, we’re seeing a growing number of media brands introduce targeted coverage for women’s sports – including Associated Press, USA Today, Roku and CNBC. Audiences and advertisers are showing up in growing numbers. But there are still plenty of opportunities out there. For media companies still sitting on the sidelines, now’s the time to get into the women’s sports game or risk being left behind.

The post Women’s sports are hot. Media: don’t miss your shot appeared first on Digital Content Next.

Warren Cohen, Vice-President and Head of Video and Audio at New York Post Digital Network, jokes that despite the age of the publication, his team is the “youngest video department” in the country. This underscores how relatively-new the brand’s cross-platform approach is. (Cohen has had his role for just under a decade.) Yet, The Post’s multi-platform strategy is a mature one that seeks to maximize the various tools at the team’s disposal.

A video strategy means YouTube (and more)

Central to any brand’s video approach is, of course, YouTube, where The Post has 1.86 million subscribers. Its content focuses on news, entertainment and sports and the channel features both timely clips and original series. There is plenty of video at NYPost.com too. However, Cohen explains that “we want to offer our audience things that they can’t get anywhere else on site.” He adds that the brand also wants “engagement throughout our owned and operated platforms, our open web product, our mobile app.”

This neatly sums up how Cohen and his team are doing things. Respecting the platforms they use is central to the strategy. Not everything is intended to be part of a funnel leading people to the outlet’s website or the print product. While doing so would be possible in an ideal world, Cohen is realistic. “I just don’t think that’s user behavior,” he says.

Cohen also notes that the audience on places like YouTube “tends to, in general, be younger. They also “spend most of their lives in the social networks and not necessarily websites.” This all means “we are trying to tweak the way we approach the off-platform audience” The takeaway is that trials and testing is crucial.

Beyond YouTube, The New York Post has built up a significant presence on the video-based social platforms. It has 2.2 million followers on TikTok and 1.6 million on Instagram. The Post also has a separate NY Post Sports Instagram account with over 41,000 followers. Cohen believes that “social really excels with short duration views… It’s the joke, the quick hit, the reaction.” Meanwhile, he observes that YouTube videos are increasing in length.

Cross-platform monetization strategy

As the video work is not primarily a funnel to subscriptions, it has to be monetized separately. This is done through a mix of programmatic advertising and sponsorships. For instance, a tri-state Cadillac dealership sponsors “24 Hours”, as series the publication makes with reality stars. Cohen is looking to develop more such deals in the future.

The determination to fully cash-in on IP goes beyond sponsorship. Cohen reveals that “we’ve had a good upsell to kind of the television and broadcast markets, and that’s always been really organic.”

He has a word of warning for others in the industry: “I think a lot of rivals might have been overly invested in studio and development operations.” While The Post wants to use the best technology and infrastructure it can, and its infamous Page Six column launched a video studio in January 2024 “we really try to let the content speak for itself, and then see where can use it to adapt.”

He also says that others “have added a lot of staff and infrastructure, hoping for big payoff.” In part he notes that this is impart because of consolidation the TV markets, and because “selling the networks is not as lucrative as it once was.”

Success stories from The Post’s approach include “Bronx Zoo ‘90”, a show about the 1990 New York Yankees which was turned from a newspaper series into a TV series by Peacock. There is also “Smothered”, a digital video series that was upsold to TLC and ran for several years. Of the strategy, Cohen says, “we’re really trying to leverage and ‘video-ify’ the best of the newsroom.”

Despite being a New York institution, The Post has been sure to have connections in Los Angeles. Troy Searer, president of New York Post Entertainment, serves as the company’s ambassador to Tinseltown and Cohen works closely with him “to make sure that no IP is left behind”.

An adaptable audio strategy

On the audio side, The Post’s podcast strategy is to offer deeper context for its audience.  “They’re the number one product for engagement,” says Cohen. Sports is a particularly important player in the company’s podcasting roster. It has separate shows for almost every New York-based team. Turns out, Giants fans don’t want to listen to podcasts that are discussing the Jets, or, as Cohen puts it: “It would be hard to have a football podcast overseas and have it feature Manchester United and Manchester City, right?”. Quite so!

“Podcasting is a giant area for us to … use our expertise in a different way,” he adds.

There is more to come on the podcasting front. The New York Post has struck a deal with Red Seat Ventures, an independent podcast production firm that was bought by Fox, to develop a flagship podcast. Cohen describes the creation of such a show as “long overdue.”

He and his team try and maximize the value they get from every piece of podcast content. “We get a lot of breakout clips,” from a 30 to 45-minute podcast, reveals Cohen. “We get a lot of moments.” He says that The New York Post wants to “micro chunk the content in a way that the audience can consume it however they want.”

Don’t fear cannibalization

The big worry many publishers have when they start making content on platforms outside of their own website is cannibalization. While they might be helping YouTube get an audience, they may not necessarily be doing so for their own outlet. This is not a concern for Cohen. “We don’t see any cannibalization of audience” he says. “We see audience that we might not have otherwise reached.”

During the recent New York Knicks NBA playoff game against the Detroit Pistons, The Post held a watch party from which it shared clips. “We’re creating content that we do distribute through all our platforms,” says Cohen.

Ultimately, Cohen says that the work he and his team is doing is “a meaningful contributor [to] revenues for the company at this point.” It shows that investing in a dedicated multi-format approach that adapts each piece of content specifically for the it is on can pay off.

The post The New York Post’s multi-platform publishing strategy appeared first on Digital Content Next.

It’s a significant conversation, but it didn’t go straight to a BBC channel. Instead, the final six-minute edit appeared on the BBC iPlayer last week and then YouTube. It was a perfect demonstration of an increasingly popular and important video format – and length.

Standing out from the video crowd

Videos that are a few, even 15, minutes long might not seem on trend in our scroll-happy world. However, in genres such as news and explainers this content length has proved to be powerful and increasingly popular.

There is an overwhelming amount of video available now and certain formats and lengths of duration are starting to stand out. Most noticeable are very long podcast episodes (think three-hour Joe Rogan episodes) and tightly edited, punchy social media clips lasting 60 to 90 seconds.

However, structured, often scripted, work lasting in the region of six to 15 minutes, is becoming a crucial part of some publishers’ strategies. Adam Tinworth, a lecturer at City St George’s in London and a commentator on audience strategy, said that “seven to 15 minutes is a kind of nice slot,” because publishers can “get a decent amount of depth without boring people.”

One outlet that produces this kind of content as part of a wide range of output is The News Movement. It publishes an eight-to-15-minute video on YouTube each month. Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Hutson told Digital Content Next that the work is “a kind of reinvented or slightly deconstructed documentary”.  She explained that her team strips out b-roll and lots of the other quirks we are accustomed to seeing on television because “it just doesn’t quite suit the medium”. The objective is to balance pace as well as depth. “The sequences are tight,” said Hutson.

Again, YouTube is the destination. Quite simply, the media companies want to go where they already know there is an audience, instead of trying to drag them to their own website.

“All our content appears quite differently on different platforms,” Hutson added, and this impacts the kind of work published there. “On Instagram, it’s a little bit more of a kind of leaning in experience, people are in a slightly different headspace…that content is appearing next to people’s friends and family.” 

It’s a point Tinworth echoes. He noted that TikTok is “not an environment where people are hunting for news-based stuff. They will encounter it, and they might consume it, but it’s not where they’re looking for it.”

Longer, perhaps more serious videos are viewed in a whole different context. Videos of longer lengths will be much more palatable on somewhere like YouTube. Viewers are increasingly comfortable with longer formats as they watch more YouTube on big TVs. Data from Tubular Labs published in July 2024 found that the number of videos over 20 minutes long being uploaded to YouTube each month rose from 1.3 million in July 2022 to 8.5 million in June 2024.

Specialist shows optimized for video length

Indeed, there are companies that are built around making highly produced videos in the six-to-15-minute-length sweet spot. Complexly, for instance make a range of shows, including science education content for children. Underknown also do this kind of work. (I particularly enjoyed learning what would happen if I fell into Jupiter as part of their “What If” series”.)

Explainers, in which a specific topic is unpacked in depth, work well “because those videos have an inherent longer life,” said Tinworth.  “You can build up this sort of body of explainer videos, which then drive traffic over long periods of time.”

Complexly is, at least in part, supported by Patreon. However, in general monetization of this kind of content seems to be based on the familiar pillars of advertising and brand sponsorships, sticking with the consensus where it is published.

Traditional broadcasters are experimenting with this format too. In addition to the Lucy Bronze interview, the BBC has previously created Ranked, a game show where groups compete for cash by guessing the correct ranking of things related to their shared passion or profession. It went out on both YouTube and the iPlayer CNN has created the more documentary-style Great Big Story on YouTube too. Nigel Dacre, a former editor of ITV news who now works as a media and digital executive said:

“In TV News, there’s an ongoing debate about how much TV news organizations should cut up their normal TV programs into short form reports. It’s not just for social media (which they all do), but also for their new streaming apps. ITV News really focuses on short form videos on ITVX, for example… a lot more than BBC News does on the iPlayer.”

Keeping control of your work

Giving work over to third parties who have… changeable… algorithmic and monetization criteria is something Jane Ferguson is trying to push back against. The eminent former foreign correspondent spent much of her career at PBS and has now founded Noospere, a subscription-based service that lets journalists own their own work instead of giving it to giant tech platforms. Think of it as a mix between Substack and a social media feed.

Yes, it’s another platform but “we’ve taken control of the distribution and put it in the hands of the journalists so effectively, you know, disintermediating the news business,” Ferguson explained.

Furthermore, “many of our colleagues and our contributors come from a Vice background where they really leaned into longer form filmmaking, but also that magazine length. I think that many field reporters have felt has been something that audiences, for years, have responded so well to. They want these more substantive pieces, but they don’t want to give you 45 minutes of their day,” said the Noosphere boss.

Ferguson also refutes the idea that not posting on giant tech platforms means you’re not going where consumers are. “We’ve gone to where the eyeballs are by going on our phones app first,” she said. For her, the hardware platform seemingly matters more than the software one.

As media executives strive to engage younger audiences, finding the sweet spot for digital video will be critical. Certainly, it’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Like the vast breadth of content that appeals to people, different lengths will suit different individuals.

As ever with creative work, this as much an art to finding the right length for video as there is a science. Testing with your audience will always be crucial. However, the success of companies like Complexly and Underknown, and the successful individual pieces of content like the Lucy Bronze interview demonstrates that seven to 15-minute-long videos are a powerful way to get in-depth information to viewers in an accessible format, particularly in the news and explainer genres.

The post Is there a perfect length for digital video? appeared first on Digital Content Next.

The next day, Amazon Prime Video showed a slate of Premier League soccer matches in the UK, which it has been doing since 2019. Boxing Day is a traditional, significant day in the UK soccer calendar. So, a tech company winning these rights was highly notable.

For streamers, those two events over Christmas set the tone for the year to come. It promises to be a hugely significant one in sports streaming that will impact every aspect of the industry, from ad-buyers and executives making programming decisions, to the teams behind the tech.

Sport drives big viewer numbers

Like their cable forebearers, everyone in streaming knows that having live sports rights is a boon for success rates. Sport helps media companies achieve multiple goals: driving subscriptions and advertising revenues. Sports streaming also provides consumers with another reason to give up their cable bundle, of which sport has long been the centerpiece.

The numbers make this all very clear. Those Christmas NFL games on Netflix drew in an average of 26.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen Big Data and Panel, with the Ravens-Texans clash peaking at 31.3 million. Ahead of time, ad packages were reportedly going for over $5 million and had sold out by mid-November.

On the surface, this is all very exciting for the sports leagues as well as the streamers. But there is a balance to be struck. Of course, the leagues want as many bidders as possible vying for their rights packages and driving up the price. They know that the direction of travel is towards streaming and away from cable and network TV.

However, it is those legacy platforms that can generally still bring in the biggest number of viewers. And that’s something that appears unlikely to change over the next 12 months. This means that while the streaming services will have a growing presence in this space, major leagues won’t be handing over all their rights packages to streamers just yet.

Sports is an advertising powerhouse

Adam Dalrymple, Senior Research Analyst at Enders Analysis, explained why advertising has also been crucial to the shift to streaming. Usually “streamers want to own global rights to content with good shelf life that can be watched on demand around the world, and sports the opposite of that,” he said. This is because “it has limited library value. You have to license it, and it’s regional.”

However, “Amazon and Netflix now have launched ad tiers,” and so are already looking to grow in that space. Yet, with Netflix, the ad-tier is still nowhere close to outstripping the ad-free tier. For example, in the UK just 20% of Netflix’s 17.6 million subscribers are on that cheaper, ad-supported tier,  according to research from Ampere Analysis.

But this no longer means the streamer cannot serve them ads.  “What’s brilliant about sport is you can sell advertising to non-ad tier members during sport,” explained Dalrymple.

New leagues, new opportunities

While streaming companies are, and should be, keen to get involved in sports, there are not that many key rights packages up for grabs at the moment. As Dalrymple noted:

“We’re actually coming to the end of a long chain of rights deals that have locked up most of the premium leagues in Europe and the US for the next few years.”

He added that “there’s actually not much room for maneuver. The NFL, the NBA in the US now is now locked up. Most of the European leagues and the Champions League have their agreements signed until 2027 at least.”

There are still opportunities to be found though. Michael Frank, Principal Analyst – Sports Media at Omdia, commented that “There’s been a lot of sports leagues popping up recently. And these sports leagues that are popping up in all different sports need to be viewed.”

These include increasingly popular sports like women’s volleyball, a 3×3 women’s basketball league and the TGL golf competition spearheaded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. “These leagues have sports rights available to them and streamers and legacy channels and broadcast channels and networks need content,” said Frank.

Dalrymple said that another area to look at is the UFC – the wildly popular Mixed Martial Arts competition lead by all-action boss Dana White. “It’s a competition that’s seen enormous growth recently. And so, I imagine you’ll see some streamers swarming around those rights when it comes up for auction.”

Some streamers are taking stock and even retreating in certain spaces. Prime Video is not keeping its Premier League coverage because of a price rise and its growing interest in the Champions League.

“The fact that Amazon Prime has pulled away from the Premier League rights means that the live football landscape in UK is dominated by Sky Sports and TNT Sports,” a senior industry insider whose current role means that could only speak anonymously, pointed out to DCN.

Technical troubles

Money is not the only thing that puts off streamers from taking the plunge into sports. Live events are particularly hard to pull off. “The technical challenges of providing sport on streaming platforms all comes from one of its biggest selling points.

The fact that it is appointment viewing,” continued the same senior industry insider. “The Paul v Tyson fight was a prime example of how buffering issues, glitches and outages can take away from the production values and spectacle of the event.” 

Netflix seems to be the company that has struggled most with this, but all are wise to be wary.

Venu didn’t have a sporting chance

So integral to the future of streaming is sports going to be that some of the biggest companies in the game decided to collaborate on a project. Venu was meant to be a partnership between Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery and we were meant to see it this year. Then, just days ago and amidst legal acrimony, Disney announced a merger between its Hulu + Live TV offering and rival Fubo, killing Venu before it ever went live.

The fact that Fubo engaged in a legal battle with some of the world’s biggest media companies underlines just how important sports is. That development is just the start of the twists and turns that we will see in the story of sports streaming in 2025.  One thing is already clear though: In an increasingly crowded and competitive space, the competition for sports will be felt across the media industry.

The post Why sports streaming will be the media story of 2025 appeared first on Digital Content Next.

There are lessons to be learned throughout the streaming ecosystem. One thing that experts agree on is that improved targeting is critical to attract brands and advertisers. Providing the insights that marketers want is essential for getting them to spend their ad dollars on streaming platforms.

Mixed revenue moves to the fore

The shift to a mixed model didn’t all happen this year, but these last 12 months feel like a point from which there is no turning back, not least because Amazon Prime Video joined Netflix in having an ad-supported offering. Other services have had them from the outset—a smart move given the high sign-up rates for ad-supported streamers.

Adding a cheaper ad-supported tier into the mix helps streaming services bring in the last holdouts and retain more of those that may be tempted to quit. To some extent, the companies actually want their customers to drop into the advertising tier because the more people seeing adverts, the more the streamers can charge for the spots.

Amazon faced a particular backlash when it launched its ad-supported tier on Prime Video this year. Unlike equivalent offerings on Netflix and Disney+, which make such tiers cheaper, Prime Video subscribers get adverts by default at the existing price and have to pay extra to not see them. To encourage retention when introducing an ad tier, companies must avoid making users feel like they are getting a degraded service or having a price rise forced upon them.

For Netflix, the addition of an ad-supported tier seems to be working. In the third quarter of this year, it added 5.1 million subscribers. The company said that in countries where the Basic with Ads tier is available, it accounted for over 50% of those taking out a subscription. This growth is crucial to Netflix because, while it might be the biggest streamer overall, it needs to find a way to bring that heft to its advertising offering.

A course correction

This is all despite the fact that, for years streamers (and Netflix in particular) worked hard to convince the audience that they wanted subscriptions instead of adverts. As Tom Harrington, Head of Television at Enders Analysis puts it: “Netflix had been telling its subscriber base for basically a decade ‘ads are the worst thing. You don’t need ads. Just pay us money.’”

However, after two bad quarters, the streamer changed its tune and launched the Basic with Ads tier in 2022. Harrington describes this as a “kneejerk” reaction. He believes that the Netflix ad product is not innovative. He also argues that traditional ratings arbiters produce more reliable data and provide a better understanding of who is actually seeing the adverts.

The lack of granularity remains a key problem among streamers as they try and draw in brands. Harrington explains that “Netflix doesn’t really know that much about its subscriber base” and argues that Netflix “is not set up” for advertising and rather rushed out its product.

The ad tools from Netflix and other streamers remain rather blunt and old-fashioned. These firms know which account played a show and which ads were served, but seemingly very little beyond that. Ollie Beckwith, Head of Digital Engagement at consultancy Sodali & Co. shares a similar view to Harrington.  He argues that other digital platforms might still be more useful to advertisers, despite the popularity of streaming.

“Even in an evolving cookie-less world, social channels like LinkedIn have grown to reach users based on highly detailed demographic variables,” he said. “On the flip side, despite Amazon owning Amazon Web Services (AWS), a platform that collects and delivers data and insights, the targeting capabilities on Amazon Prime Video are too broad to have a meaningful impact on corporate individuals, the same can be said about advertising on Apple TV.”

Thus, it is critical that streamers work to improve their targeting capabilities to stay competitive in the digital ad space. AI is likely to play a significant role in this. Spotify has already incorporated it and other platforms need to focus on an effective rollout of ad-related AI technology for everything from operations to creative.

Offer meaningful advertising opportunities

Jayesh Rajdev, Controller of Advanced Advertising at ITV, a Public Service Broadcaster (PSB) in the UK, pushes back against the narrative that streaming ads are inefficient. He says that the partnerships his company has with credit ratings agency Experian and major supermarket Tesco help it provide its advertisers with meaningful targeting.

He explains that ITV has “a really well-established partnership with Tesco where we’ve matched [streaming service] ITVX users to Tesco Clubcard holders at a registered user level. So, you’ve got the biggest viewer graph, if you like, matched to the biggest shopper graph.” Ultimately, the ITV ad innovator argues that the “ability to build an almost funnel centric approach to how you use or deploy your TV advertising has become really powerful.”

Things are moving forward too. “We’re evolving from attributes to attributes plus intent,” he says. I.e., instead of just knowing characteristics of the person with the account, they can identify some shopping intentions too. This is going to be another crucial thing for any streaming platform to develop moving forward.

Streaming advertising opportunities ahead

Given the developments we’ve already seen over the last 12 months, the year ahead in streaming advertising is likely to be a fascinating, and rapidly evolving, one. Making advertising more interactive will be one area of focus for the industry.

Mike Caprio, SVP, GM Global Advertising at unified video tech platform JWP Connatix believes that in 2025 we will see “the fusion of commerce and video as payment processors like PayPal and eCommerce platforms like Shopify enter the fray. Shoppable video—with seamless purchase integrations—emerges as a critical tool for performance-driven campaigns.”

Rajdev reveals that ITV is “about to launch our own really pioneering lead gen ad format that is all remote control initiated for the viewer, and a really slick experience that enables our to convey interests in an ad on ITVX really, really quickly and in a super, super slick way.”

Another key area of opportunity is sports, where viewers are generally used to, and accepting of, advertising. “Sports will serve as a huge opportunity for the growth of ad-supported streaming in 2025,” according to Keith Bedford, General Manager EMEA of streaming tech company Wurl.

“As studios and sports broadcasters struggle to tie in major upfront deals and connect with younger audiences, new models for revenue and content discovery will be required,” adds Bedford. “Short-form video could be one way we start to see sports content companies garner interest and boost engagement for their long-form and TVOD [transactional video on demand] businesses.”

One thing is clear, from adding interactivity to improve targeting, those offering ad-based streaming platforms are going to have to keep innovating if they want to draw in marketing dollars from big brands. Despite the fact that streaming seems to edging closer to classic television experiences (and business models), today’s brands expect to know their money is being spent wisely, and streaming platforms will need to prove it.

The post Streaming and advertising: A classic tale—with a twist appeared first on Digital Content Next.