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Video is essential to online news – just ask Brightcove

“Consider a page without video as a naked page”

by WAN-IFRA Staff executivenews@wan-ifra.org | November 29, 2012

Jeff Whatcott would say that – after all, he is the Chief Marketing Officer at video hosting giant Brightcove. We were speaking to him on a study tour visit to their HQ in Boston last month.

But of course most news organisations with a strong online presence agree. For example, Kalle Jungkvist – Senior Advisor to Schibsted Media Group and Frenemies Consultant with WAN-IFRA, says “integrated news videos and integrated web TV is more or less a must for a modern news site” (see video below from his interview at DME12).

And the trend is growing fast. Chris Berend, Head of Digital Video Production and Content Development at Bloomberg, says they recently “more than doubled amount of video streams being consumed across web and mobile properties”.

More and more news media companies are working with partners like Brightcove to optimise their video content and Jeff was happy to share some of his hints and tips for getting the best from your video strategy, for instance:-

  • Pick the right thumbnail and make sensible use of autoplay to maximise views (e.g. www.weather.com)
  • Vary your ad strategy e.g. offer 30sec pre-roll only on longer high value content or after longer period of click engagement.
  • Get video above the (online) fold to get best value
  • Remember video is ranked higher on google – so expose all meta data and have a separate video portal – e.g. USA Today, NYT (both Brightcove customers)

And to generate all this? Either completely outsource to a third party partner or, for serious value, make sure every member of editorial staff is qualified to do digital storytelling – and for Brightcove that means video storytelling.

The Digital Media team will be back in the US in March 2013 – for more info click here.

(photo Creative Commons by Do u remember on Flickr)

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